European Parliament voted *AGAINST* software patents (amended the original bad version from Commission with clauses the prevent patentability of pure software) in September 2003. I'm sure they've done a lot of bad things but in patent issue they're Good Guys if there are any.
European Council of Ministers (=representatives of the national governments, representatives that in this case however apparently DID NOT represent the interest of their governments) dismissed the Parliaments good amendmends in May, they are *FOR* software patents.
Fortunately, it needs to go trough parliament for a second time... they won't tolerate being walked over this easily.
The UK government is one of the only government that came out clearly against software patents.
In "March 2001" perhaps. UK Minister STRONGLY SUPPORTED SW PATENTS IN COUNCIL VOTING! Not just support either, they spout a typical pro-patent talk crap in there too. Transcription:
(22:00) UK
Thank you. The UK can support the draft proposed by the Presidency not least because we've been concerned at the apparent divergence of practice in this field given the importance of information and communications industries to the economy. This Directive will give greater legal certainty and we're in favor of clarifying more in this area, although not changing it to extend or restrict patentability. The Directive does appear to meet the needs of innovators and users of software and computer-implemented inventions; it's obviously important that we keep this area as straightforward as possible. I was reassured to hear the comments of Commissioner Bolkestein making clear that companies who did abuse their position could be dealt with using competition law. I think we need to be clear here that we need incentives for innovation, and that this Directive is about creating incentives to research, and that manufacturers, not just computer programmers, need this Directive, given that it deals with inventions using software; and on those bases, and particularly given, I think, the need for certainty and to avoid a legislative vacuum in this particular case, we could support the draft proposed by the Presidency.
If the easiest or best known (or possibly the obvious) way of doing something is restricted, people and companies are motivated to come up with a new way of doing it.
That may be true for patents as they were supposed to be, but USPTO has several times demonstrated they're perfectly willing to grant patents that don't restrict a "way of doing something" but "doing something" in general. An IDEA of doing something should not be something that is patentable, it doesn't encourage anything, except greed!
And EPO will certainly be just as braindead, have no doubts about it.
[minister] claims it was an error in his word processor.
Well... it was probably a Microsoft word processor. "It looks like you're trying to write a bill opposed to software patents! Would you like some help?"
I say, away with that lying bastard (Excuse my language here I'm really pissed) a lying minister is something that CANNOT be tolerated in a modern and decent democracy
Are you trying to imply that non-lyin and all-around decent politicians exist? I'm sorry, but what world did you say you come from?
Well, it certainly never made it into redhat9 - which was a very gnome-centric distribution, and is not that old.
I'm pretty sure it DID make it into RH9, but certainly not going to install that one to check...
lists, default and mandatory settings couldn't be changed until recently (in CVS, about 2 to 5 weeks ago).
This response illustrates my point far better than anything I've said. How many years has gconf been around? I would have thought that configuration of a configuration system would be a higher proirity than crafting a windows GUI registry editor lookalike - but that's looking from a perspective where everything can be a file and a web browser is an application and not part of the OS.
Really? Isn't it just the opposite: the GUI registry editor lookalike is indeed a lower priority than the underlying configuration system and that's exactly it took a long time to implement those in that gui thingy? Anyway, looks like I was wrong about lists, gconf-editor in FC2 does support them and is older than 2 to 5 weeks.
Defaults and mandatory settings are for sysadmins, usually one-time thing after installation and are probably scripted anyway so nobody missed gui for them, easily doable with command line tools.
Well, it is very much an old school unix style of things, and if the gnome developers were like that they would have started with flat files before progressing to a database, instead of starting with the then trendy XML thing
You can't get much farther from old school style of things than having one big database file that stores preferences of every application! XML tree is somewhere in middle ground between of that and flat files.
which defeated the whole purpose of XML by only being changeable by gconftool/gconftool-1/gconftool-2.
I really can't see what's supposed to be so unchangeable, but just in case, gconf developers agree, simplification of the XML format is on TODO.
gconf is, indeed, by it's very nature for storing only user preferences, instead of every last setting on system, if that's the same thing as "toy for keeping track of icon positions", I do not know, system-wide daemon (instead of each having own gconfd process, I assume) however seems to also be on that list...
Neither the registry editor lookalike GUI nor xml backend are the main focus, they can be changed, or removed, but the fact that apps have a consistent and easy to use API that implements necessary things for reading and storing configuration.
But it's obviously at least partly a matter of taste, and you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced, I didn't intend this to be a semi-religious flamewar, just needed to point out that "gconf != need to reboot"
(If there is transactions in MySQL, I stand corrected, but they must have added the support just recently)
I guess it debends on your definition of "recent", transaction-supporting InnoDB has been there for two years or so. Default type is still transactionless, though.
Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't even stop to consider spending thousand dollars for underpowered, over-integrated (unupgradable) fugly box for DESKTOP.
Laptops, however, are another story... Personal nominee for "cheap" mac: 12" or 14" iBook. They're somewhat more expensive and less powerful than eMac, but much cheaper relative to x86 competitors.
Prior to entering into a 'professional career', I did not know anyone who actually purchased Photoshop.
But, 15 years later, I don't know anyone who steals any software.
And that's how it works. And that's how the software companies expect it to work!
Despite all the yelling about pirates, they know and even depend on kids getting their stuff for free, becoming familiar with it, and buying a copy when they grow up and get a job related to that very same software.
That one's pretty harmless and easy to spot since it's proof of concept, but it's nevertheless scary thought to have viruses that could hide themselves to pseudo-files that are not visible in any way if you don't know what to search for, and even then only enumerably by weird totally unrelated and/or undocumented functions...
That looks like it's intended to prevent circumventing the GPL by bundling it with proprietary libraries that also happen to be system libraries, however the wording indeed looks like it also would prevent distribution along with OS...
I guess you could argue that even though bundling msvcrt and GPL'd program using it clearly isn't allowed, but in case of Windows msvcrt accompanies OS itself, not the executable per se, but this is obviously quite shaky and IANAL anyway. This may be a case of merely bad wording, someone interested should ask FSF for clarification on the matter.
Satellite. And cable. <10 is quite normal for normal OTA networks, but orbital junkstations keep bombarding the poor Earthlings with shitloads of pure garbage.
Not really applicable. People don't grow enough marijuana to get calories to live off of indoors. If they did, their power bills would be astronomical, as would the equipment that they needed.
You don't necessarily need to grow calories 100% of the time, just keeping the plants alive over the night time could suffice, and the amount of light for that is easily doable without astronomical power requirements (not even as much as marijuana, think house plants).
Long-term, it should not impossible to breed or GM a plant that can stand 2 week dark period on it's own (assuming one suitable for food production doesn't already exist, counting not only traditional plants but edible fungi, etc.), deciduous plants in big parts of the world already spend better part of the year without any photosynthesis at all.
Which version implemented this? Is this version only available in CVS or has it had a wider release?
Well, there's a CVS commit with comment " Added support for editing keys, adding new keys, and unsetting keys." dated 2.5 years ago, no idea which version that corresponds to, but it's been quite a while since that anyway. So I'm guessing you must be referring to something else entirely... lists, default and mandatory settings couldn't be changed until recently (in CVS, about 2 to 5 weeks ago).
Good, so something sane like berkeley db
You mean something like this? It's long since been removed though, simply because nobody used it.
can be used apart from the format which until recently (if you are correct) was only changeable with undocumented hacks. There are/were a lot of keys you just couldn't get to any other way.
I wouldn't exactly call 2½ years "recently" but whatever, and those command line tools are not anywhere neal the level of "undocumented hacks" even if they do (did? seemed fine for the very simple thing they do last time I checked) not have the best documentation. And if you're going to use bdb-API (I sure hope you weren't planning to db_dump, text edit and db_load) you are doing "hacks" anyway, why not go trought the gconf itself?
Radio interferences is much bigger problem than few neighbours losing their nights sleep, there's all kind of important systems running on the radio bands, not just few ham hobbyists. Not to mention how much larger area it affects.
You don't think it's reasonable for neighbours to contact the police if you're jamming loud enough that it keeps the whole city awake, and no less than THREE MONTHS IN A ROW?
It's bad idea because those "problems that need to be worked out" CAN NOT be worked out.
You can't "work out" laws of physics, and laws of physics say that large bandwidth over this kind of wires cause interference to just about everything, not just few hobbists.
You need new cables for broadband, and if you put in new cables then it's easier (=cheaper) to just go DSL route.
What makes you think its impossible to design a secure system?
Well, that's quite simple. You can't make a perfect system. Even if your goal is security and you "scrap the old code and redesign" after you find a bug, there's always the time between finding the improper implementation and the fix, and the update.
Linux can be vastly better than Windows in security, but it, or anything else, can NOT be PERFECT in that, or any other sense. Thinking otherwise is just being self-delusional.
That, and then there's the more important part: people will be using that system. People are stupid.
You can't idiot proof something because nature will ALWAYS invent a better idiot.
Two years without a hitch and then quick decline doesn't really sound like a chipset problem, but a capacitor problem.
I had a KT7-RAID that worked fine for 2½ years and then blew a cap too, was fixed quicky enough, though, and AFAIK it's still working though not in my possession any more.
We can't laugh at MS for this anymore thanks to gconf in the gnome project.
Really? Since, as others have stated, registry hasn't got anything to do at all with this problem. Quite contrary, it notifies app if a setting changes so you can actually pick up new settings easier without resorting to polling...
It's like the windows registry, only obfiscated
I guess you mean it's like the windows registry, only UN-obfuscated. After all, no matter how "strange xml variant" it uses, it's well organized and human readable, unlike the monolithic binary kludge several megs of size that is registry...
can only modify it reliably with poorly documented command line tools. There's a pretty little GUI that looks like a registry editor, shows you the keys but won't let you modify them.
False. Gconf-editor (the gui tool) DOES let you modify things. It also has a nice long string description (localized, too) of most keys, and is much better organized so it's not even cryptic, like registry, things are easier to find and much easier to know what they do.
I know some gnome people like the MS way of doing things, but it seems to be going a bit far.
I know some people knee-jerk at every thing MS has ever done, no matter if the idea itself is actually bad or no, but that seems to be going a bit far. Just because MS has screwed, corruption prone GIGANTIC implementation of registry that stores EVERYTHING and it's mother doesn't mean that the concept of registry like system is invalid!
It really is a lot simpler to put things under/etc or ~/.gnomethan in some strange XML variant that is hidden under ~/.gnome anyway.
Well, no, it's not. You can't get change notifications from dotfiles, you can't get multiple apps reading and changing them without all kinds of nasty locking problems, you can't create a tweak-ui like gui with a collection for most wanted "hidden" settings without knowing how to parse kazillion trillion different kinds of configuration files, you can't get regedit/gconf-editor like relatively simple tool for much easier option changing than having to hunt a simple, not always well named conf file and learning it's syntax, sysadmin can't change mandatory or default values as easily.
And it doesn't have to be XML, gconf is written so backends can be added modularly, you could use LDAP or even RDBMS remote server for storing preferences, roaming profiles... heck, for masochists like you someone could write an ini-file backend.
I grant you that gconf - despite being vastly better than windows registry - has it's own share of problems, but they are implementation problems, the idea of simple shared config system is good.
Probably because the genes for color are in the X chromossome, and at most two genes for each chromossome.
That is correct, though not quite 100% since there's always some change of chromosomal disorders...
Coat coloration in cats is complex. The genes involved include the Orange gene, O, which in its dominant form, O, produces orange fur, and in its recessive form, o, produces black fur.
For a cat to be calico, it must simultaneously express two genes, O and o, which are located at the same location on the X chromosome. Males normally cannot do this: they can have only one allele, as they have only one X chromosome. Over 90% of tortoiseshell cats are females. Occasionally a male is born. These have Klinefelter's syndrome and are almost always sterile.
Most of the cheap "industrial" methanol, despite the nickname, doesn't actually come from wood, it's synthesized from methane (which in turn is usually separated from fossil fuels, mostly natural gas). Well... I guess that means it still comes from wood, but I doubt even the most dedicated Druid will object to mistreatment of tens of millions of years old tree waste...
Just picking nits, the point that it's quite plentiful and very cheap obviously still stands.
Um, if you're selling something that gets brought back so often it's not doing any profit you stop selling that crap, not continue till you've got nothing left and let yourself be destroyed.
Manufacturer warranty is fine, but the warehouse was one who sold YOU the product and it's they you are doing the business with. Warehouse can then deal with the people who sold them the faulty thing (manufacturer, or import company) and ask for compensation or whatever.
Every mail-order company (and yes, that includes online stores) here is bound by law to have 14-day return policy, and funnily they seem to be handling it just fine... not sure if shipping is supposed to be covered, but usually it isn't.
Besides, few minor losses taken from a return here and there are far outweighted by free PR you get, there are so many online stores they can't drive prices down any more so reputation is one thing left they can compete with...
Slashdot Mirror
Built-in since 0.8, at least according to Bugzilla (direct links from slashdot don't work, copypaste and open manually)
European Parliament voted *AGAINST* software patents (amended the original bad version from Commission with clauses the prevent patentability of pure software) in September 2003. I'm sure they've done a lot of bad things but in patent issue they're Good Guys if there are any.
European Council of Ministers (=representatives of the national governments, representatives that in this case however apparently DID NOT represent the interest of their governments) dismissed the Parliaments good amendmends in May, they are *FOR* software patents.
Fortunately, it needs to go trough parliament for a second time... they won't tolerate being walked over this easily.
The UK government is one of the only government that came out clearly against software patents.
In "March 2001" perhaps. UK Minister STRONGLY SUPPORTED SW PATENTS IN COUNCIL VOTING! Not just support either, they spout a typical pro-patent talk crap in there too. Transcription:
If the easiest or best known (or possibly the obvious) way of doing something is restricted, people and companies are motivated to come up with a new way of doing it.
That may be true for patents as they were supposed to be, but USPTO has several times demonstrated they're perfectly willing to grant patents that don't restrict a "way of doing something" but "doing something" in general. An IDEA of doing something should not be something that is patentable, it doesn't encourage anything, except greed!
And EPO will certainly be just as braindead, have no doubts about it.
[minister] claims it was an error in his word processor.
Well... it was probably a Microsoft word processor. "It looks like you're trying to write a bill opposed to software patents! Would you like some help?"
I say, away with that lying bastard (Excuse my language here I'm really pissed) a lying minister is something that CANNOT be tolerated in a modern and decent democracy
Are you trying to imply that non-lyin and all-around decent politicians exist? I'm sorry, but what world did you say you come from?
If you're running it non-interactively from command line anyway, why bother with up2date at all, instead of yum?
Well, it certainly never made it into redhat9 - which was a very gnome-centric distribution, and is not that old.
I'm pretty sure it DID make it into RH9, but certainly not going to install that one to check...
lists, default and mandatory settings couldn't be changed until recently (in CVS, about 2 to 5 weeks ago).
This response illustrates my point far better than anything I've said. How many years has gconf been around? I would have thought that configuration of a configuration system would be a higher proirity than crafting a windows GUI registry editor lookalike - but that's looking from a perspective where everything can be a file and a web browser is an application and not part of the OS.
Really? Isn't it just the opposite: the GUI registry editor lookalike is indeed a lower priority than the underlying configuration system and that's exactly it took a long time to implement those in that gui thingy? Anyway, looks like I was wrong about lists, gconf-editor in FC2 does support them and is older than 2 to 5 weeks.
Defaults and mandatory settings are for sysadmins, usually one-time thing after installation and are probably scripted anyway so nobody missed gui for them, easily doable with command line tools.
Well, it is very much an old school unix style of things, and if the gnome developers were like that they would have started with flat files before progressing to a database, instead of starting with the then trendy XML thing
You can't get much farther from old school style of things than having one big database file that stores preferences of every application! XML tree is somewhere in middle ground between of that and flat files.
which defeated the whole purpose of XML by only being changeable by gconftool/gconftool-1/gconftool-2.
I really can't see what's supposed to be so unchangeable, but just in case, gconf developers agree, simplification of the XML format is on TODO.
gconf is, indeed, by it's very nature for storing only user preferences, instead of every last setting on system, if that's the same thing as "toy for keeping track of icon positions", I do not know, system-wide daemon (instead of each having own gconfd process, I assume) however seems to also be on that list...
Neither the registry editor lookalike GUI nor xml backend are the main focus, they can be changed, or removed, but the fact that apps have a consistent and easy to use API that implements necessary things for reading and storing configuration.
But it's obviously at least partly a matter of taste, and you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced, I didn't intend this to be a semi-religious flamewar, just needed to point out that "gconf != need to reboot"
(If there is transactions in MySQL, I stand corrected, but they must have added the support just recently)
I guess it debends on your definition of "recent", transaction-supporting InnoDB has been there for two years or so. Default type is still transactionless, though.
Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't even stop to consider spending thousand dollars for underpowered, over-integrated (unupgradable) fugly box for DESKTOP.
Laptops, however, are another story... Personal nominee for "cheap" mac: 12" or 14" iBook. They're somewhat more expensive and less powerful than eMac, but much cheaper relative to x86 competitors.
Prior to entering into a 'professional career', I did not know anyone who actually purchased Photoshop.
But, 15 years later, I don't know anyone who steals any software.
And that's how it works. And that's how the software companies expect it to work!
Despite all the yelling about pirates, they know and even depend on kids getting their stuff for free, becoming familiar with it, and buying a copy when they grow up and get a job related to that very same software.
Ditto the viruses.
Indeed.
That one's pretty harmless and easy to spot since it's proof of concept, but it's nevertheless scary thought to have viruses that could hide themselves to pseudo-files that are not visible in any way if you don't know what to search for, and even then only enumerably by weird totally unrelated and/or undocumented functions...
That looks like it's intended to prevent circumventing the GPL by bundling it with proprietary libraries that also happen to be system libraries, however the wording indeed looks like it also would prevent distribution along with OS...
I guess you could argue that even though bundling msvcrt and GPL'd program using it clearly isn't allowed, but in case of Windows msvcrt accompanies OS itself, not the executable per se, but this is obviously quite shaky and IANAL anyway. This may be a case of merely bad wording, someone interested should ask FSF for clarification on the matter.
What the heck are you talking about slashdotters?
Satellite. And cable. <10 is quite normal for normal OTA networks, but orbital junkstations keep bombarding the poor Earthlings with shitloads of pure garbage.
And no, nobody needs 500 channels.
Not really applicable. People don't grow enough marijuana to get calories to live off of indoors. If they did, their power bills would be astronomical, as would the equipment that they needed.
You don't necessarily need to grow calories 100% of the time, just keeping the plants alive over the night time could suffice, and the amount of light for that is easily doable without astronomical power requirements (not even as much as marijuana, think house plants).
Long-term, it should not impossible to breed or GM a plant that can stand 2 week dark period on it's own (assuming one suitable for food production doesn't already exist, counting not only traditional plants but edible fungi, etc.), deciduous plants in big parts of the world already spend better part of the year without any photosynthesis at all.
Which version implemented this? Is this version only available in CVS or has it had a wider release?
Well, there's a CVS commit with comment " Added support for editing keys, adding new keys, and unsetting keys." dated 2.5 years ago, no idea which version that corresponds to, but it's been quite a while since that anyway. So I'm guessing you must be referring to something else entirely... lists, default and mandatory settings couldn't be changed until recently (in CVS, about 2 to 5 weeks ago).
Good, so something sane like berkeley db
You mean something like this? It's long since been removed though, simply because nobody used it.
can be used apart from the format which until recently (if you are correct) was only changeable with undocumented hacks. There are/were a lot of keys you just couldn't get to any other way.
I wouldn't exactly call 2½ years "recently" but whatever, and those command line tools are not anywhere neal the level of "undocumented hacks" even if they do (did? seemed fine for the very simple thing they do last time I checked) not have the best documentation. And if you're going to use bdb-API (I sure hope you weren't planning to db_dump, text edit and db_load) you are doing "hacks" anyway, why not go trought the gconf itself?
Bullshit.
Radio interferences is much bigger problem than few neighbours losing their nights sleep, there's all kind of important systems running on the radio bands, not just few ham hobbyists. Not to mention how much larger area it affects.
You don't think it's reasonable for neighbours to contact the police if you're jamming loud enough that it keeps the whole city awake, and no less than THREE MONTHS IN A ROW?
It's bad idea because those "problems that need to be worked out" CAN NOT be worked out.
You can't "work out" laws of physics, and laws of physics say that large bandwidth over this kind of wires cause interference to just about everything, not just few hobbists.
You need new cables for broadband, and if you put in new cables then it's easier (=cheaper) to just go DSL route.
What makes you think its impossible to design a secure system?
Well, that's quite simple. You can't make a perfect system. Even if your goal is security and you "scrap the old code and redesign" after you find a bug, there's always the time between finding the improper implementation and the fix, and the update.
Linux can be vastly better than Windows in security, but it, or anything else, can NOT be PERFECT in that, or any other sense. Thinking otherwise is just being self-delusional.
That, and then there's the more important part: people will be using that system. People are stupid.
You can't idiot proof something because nature will ALWAYS invent a better idiot.
Two years without a hitch and then quick decline doesn't really sound like a chipset problem, but a capacitor problem.
I had a KT7-RAID that worked fine for 2½ years and then blew a cap too, was fixed quicky enough, though, and AFAIK it's still working though not in my possession any more.
We can't laugh at MS for this anymore thanks to gconf in the gnome project.
/etc or ~/.gnomethan in some strange XML variant that is hidden under ~/.gnome anyway.
Really? Since, as others have stated, registry hasn't got anything to do at all with this problem. Quite contrary, it notifies app if a setting changes so you can actually pick up new settings easier without resorting to polling...
It's like the windows registry, only obfiscated
I guess you mean it's like the windows registry, only UN-obfuscated. After all, no matter how "strange xml variant" it uses, it's well organized and human readable, unlike the monolithic binary kludge several megs of size that is registry...
can only modify it reliably with poorly documented command line tools. There's a pretty little GUI that looks like a registry editor, shows you the keys but won't let you modify them.
False. Gconf-editor (the gui tool) DOES let you modify things. It also has a nice long string description (localized, too) of most keys, and is much better organized so it's not even cryptic, like registry, things are easier to find and much easier to know what they do.
I know some gnome people like the MS way of doing things, but it seems to be going a bit far.
I know some people knee-jerk at every thing MS has ever done, no matter if the idea itself is actually bad or no, but that seems to be going a bit far. Just because MS has screwed, corruption prone GIGANTIC implementation of registry that stores EVERYTHING and it's mother doesn't mean that the concept of registry like system is invalid!
It really is a lot simpler to put things under
Well, no, it's not. You can't get change notifications from dotfiles, you can't get multiple apps reading and changing them without all kinds of nasty locking problems, you can't create a tweak-ui like gui with a collection for most wanted "hidden" settings without knowing how to parse kazillion trillion different kinds of configuration files, you can't get regedit/gconf-editor like relatively simple tool for much easier option changing than having to hunt a simple, not always well named conf file and learning it's syntax, sysadmin can't change mandatory or default values as easily.
And it doesn't have to be XML, gconf is written so backends can be added modularly, you could use LDAP or even RDBMS remote server for storing preferences, roaming profiles... heck, for masochists like you someone could write an ini-file backend.
I grant you that gconf - despite being vastly better than windows registry - has it's own share of problems, but they are implementation problems, the idea of simple shared config system is good.
It was diamond cable. Surprisingly close to the stuff we're trying to make it from...
That is correct, though not quite 100% since there's always some change of chromosomal disorders...
More
BTW, do cats have the same XX / XY chromossome thing as humans?
Yes. All but few mammals have.
Most of the cheap "industrial" methanol, despite the nickname, doesn't actually come from wood, it's synthesized from methane (which in turn is usually separated from fossil fuels, mostly natural gas). Well... I guess that means it still comes from wood, but I doubt even the most dedicated Druid will object to mistreatment of tens of millions of years old tree waste...
Just picking nits, the point that it's quite plentiful and very cheap obviously still stands.
Well, there's a much cheaper source than rubbing alcohol (which may be ethanol or isopropyl as well), with WAY more than 5% concentration.
Windshield wiper fluid, though it too can be denaturated ethanol sometimes, should't be too hard to find out what any particular brand is made of...
And drinking it sure will make you blind, but that's not a big deal any more, since it will also kill you.
Um, if you're selling something that gets brought back so often it's not doing any profit you stop selling that crap, not continue till you've got nothing left and let yourself be destroyed.
Manufacturer warranty is fine, but the warehouse was one who sold YOU the product and it's they you are doing the business with. Warehouse can then deal with the people who sold them the faulty thing (manufacturer, or import company) and ask for compensation or whatever.
Every mail-order company (and yes, that includes online stores) here is bound by law to have 14-day return policy, and funnily they seem to be handling it just fine... not sure if shipping is supposed to be covered, but usually it isn't.
Besides, few minor losses taken from a return here and there are far outweighted by free PR you get, there are so many online stores they can't drive prices down any more so reputation is one thing left they can compete with...
Checking emails as they come takes more time than quickly scanning over 50 messages at the end of day.