In my experience, the Oracle sales teams sell to the senior executives. Although the database product isn't complete crap, it was adopted far beyond its technical merits warranted when I worked with it (late 1980s). My Significant Other has worked with it extensively since then, and reports that Oracle and the Oracle layered products still hold an unholy fascination with the senior executives. She has spent 3 years demonstrating the flexibility and cost effectiveness of other products at her workplace, but some senior managers there persist in repeating their "discovery projects" (to identify the best technology) until the right answer (Oracle) is produced by the technical staff.
Another good reason not to install any more apps than you really need to on your smartphone. I use the browser wherever possible. The risk of giving someone else's code the authority to execute on my hardware if I can access the info I want through the browser isn't worth it.
I also reset the advertising ID every once in a while, and set "Limit Ad Tracking" on, and clear the history and website data regularly. It would be nice if Apple would build in a single button to do this... perhaps give it a cute name like "Data flush"; they could even play a sound effect like a flushing toilet when you press the button.
Your electric company may have already replaced your traditional meter with an electronic meter that monitors your energy consumption on a very fine-grained basis; the data from these meters is already being collected by the utilities. Researchers at UMass showed that they could determine what loads were being switched on and off inside a home with such a meter. Nest smoke detectors monitor "presence" information on a room-by-room basis and feed it up to the cloud. If you have cloud-based "smart home" devices (room by room presence, electrical switch state, thermostat/temperature state, door monitoring, etc., then they are feeding the state of your home to the cloud, where it can be used to determine what the people in your home are doing. If you are using geo-fencing with your smartphone, your location is being fed into these cloud systems (quite apart from the "ordinary" concerns about cell company location monitoring). If you have video/audio devices that feed into the cloud, people with access to that information can observe/monitor directly what the people in your home are doing.
The ability to pull all this information together may involved inter-corporate agreements or a government mandate, but it obviously enables a kind of surveillance that makes past court cases involving thermal scanners being used to peep inside dwellings charming glimpses of a less intrusive era. The fact that there is a) no legislation regarding the protection of privacy, and b) very low public awareness of the risks involved, make it very unlikely that the brakes will be applied to the adoption of these systems any time soon. We are bugging our own homes; the panopticon isn't something the government will force upon us, it is something we are building that the corporations/government need merely to tap into.
Never take jobs at companies that produce commodities
IT in general was a lot more fun when hardware was really really expensive. When it cost $500,000 to $1,000,000 to buy one computer that supported an entire engineering office, the five or so acolytes that it took to run the machine were treated very well. Now that it costs on the order of $500 for the hardware for one person, the two or three IT janitors who are taking care of everything for several hundred people are squeezed tight as if paying them any more would bankrupt the company.
Commodities are great for the consumers, not so great for the providers. A lot of conversations in commodity supply chains are about reducing costs, as it is the only way to make more (probably temporary) profit.
I used to work for a somewhat enlightened company that ensured all workers had offices (with doors). Unfortunately I was a consultant/contractor, and over time our customers (federal government) chose to house contractors working on-site in densely-packed cube farms (with as many as 4 of us to a cube that might house one government worker). My productivity went steadily down as distractions went up. Even work-related discussions (but not related to the problem I was working on) steal my attention if keywords or subjects that affect me come up. Some of us took to wearing headphones, but that was eventually discouraged because it was unsightly and went against the "team" atmosphere. Sigh.
Using them in sexual videos without their consent should be considered sexual assult.
That would be contrary to the plain definition of assault: "make a physical attack on" and even the extended legal (in some jurisdictions) definition fo assault: "a credible threat or attempt to cause battery" (where battery refers to the actual bodily contact). I'm not arguing against the idea that using someone's likeness in photos or videos without their consent being illegal, just the idea that it be labeled as "assault." Otherwise, this would dilute the definition of assault. Perhaps someone could come up with a more appropriate label apart from borrowing one from a different kind illegal act.
I don't understand how a normal person can be against net neutrality. Can someone explain?
As someone who thought the need for "common carrier" status for broadband Internet access communication services to the home was fairly obvious, I share your confusion. There are a couple of issues at play, I think:
Once the conversation strays from classifying broadband Internet access communication services as a "common carrier" service to Net Neutrality, the various definitions of what Net Neutrality is, and how it would be protected and guaranteed, get into the mix. A key factor here is "network management" concerns, sometimes expressed as (1) "Net Neutrality" would block all possibility of managing traffic flows and (2) without managing traffic flows certain types of traffic would naturally overwhelm other types of traffic and then (3) service would go to hell and (4) there would be nothing a carrier could do about it so (5) we would all suffer. So a normal person might become concerned that Net Neutrality will cause their quality of service to become significantly degraded. At least, that is what some of the major telecommunications service firms have implied.
Some telecommunications vendors claim that Net Neutrality would hamper their ability to deliver "innovative" types of services. Without knowing what this means, and without having any experience to draw upon to guess what this might mean, a normal person could come to conclude that a lack of innovation would be bad, and keep them from enjoying the future benefits of these innovative services.
So there are two reasons why a normal person could be against Net Neutrality. I'm sure that there are others.
I happen to believe that these two reasons, and other arguments that I have heard, are all self-serving justifications from greedy near-monopolies that are seeking to maximize their profit and have determined that they can best do so by avoiding/undoing the commoditization of Internet access. They didn't bring about the innovation that was the Internet, the innovation of making Internet access ubiquitously available to practically every household, nor the innovative services on the Internet that drives Internet usage even higher, but they damn well want to be the gatekeepers that "innovatively" control our ability to make use of all of these innovations. They do their damndest to convince everyone that the wealth of good that comes from the Internet is there by their doing, despite the fact that the range of services provided by ISPs has steadily declined from the days of the neighborhood dial-up ISPs to today.
There *might* have been glimmers of argument that ISPs were "information service providers" in the days when ISPs provided network news, web-site hosting, mail services, and more to their customers. Once the big telcos systematically gobbled up all of those ISPs and turned off most of these services, leaving just Internet access behind, the idea that they were anything but telecommunications service providers was laughable. CompuServe, America On-line, Prodigy and others from the 1990s provided actual information services in the days before the web. They sold you dial-up to THEIR hosted services and content. The Internet changed all of that... an Internet user could access everyone's content, not just the content of their provider. And that changed the game.
Which service is relatively new and might have more open addresses.
How do I get my 50k emails OUT of gmail and the IN to the new service.
Register your own domain name and have whatever e-mail address you want, including your full name if you like. There are domain registrars that even offer e-mail services: Hover, for one. It will cost you a relatively small amount of money on a recurring basis to host your e-mail with a provider like Hover, but it saves you the hassle of running your own e-mail server and it will give you complete control over your address.
I have not attempted this on the scale which you name (50,000 e-mail messages) but consider trying IMAP as the way to get your messages off of Google and stored locally to your e-mail client or even onto another IMAP server if you like. I did it on a much smaller scale when I switched ISPs from Verizon to Comcast. I hope it goes without saying that you won't have your actual Gmail address in the new service.
That's not really true. A lot of small-time investors are invested in funds that charge significant fees based on the amount invested. Almost all mutual funds have some sort of percentage fee, though it is quite small for the better index funds. On top of that, many retail investors are paying a "financial adviser" (really a salesperson) a percentage of assets under management (often 1-1.5%). Total fees can easily be greater than 2% a year. That doesn't sound like much, but if you are a retired person, that amount represents HALF your annual income (not including social security).
The sad thing is that all these fees are rarely necessary. Simply investing in low-fee index funds from the likes of Vanguard or Fidelity gets your fees down to a nominal level (like.05%). Indeed, trading makes no sense for the retail investor, but fees on trades are rarely the biggest fees retail investors pay.
Well said. The best book I ever read was https://www.amazon.com/Only-Investment-Guide-Youll-Ever/dp/0547447256. Coming from a blue-collar background with no family history of success in money management beyond my parent's getting a VA-backed mortgage, I bought it after I had gotten out in the workforce in a tech job and started wondering what I should be doing with my excess cash (a novel concept to me). I made some cautious trades in individual stocks and some options, guided by a broker who had picked me up in his stable of marks, but didn't know how to know what I was doing. This book, along with my own experiences and other information gleaned here and there, helped me understand how to NOT get fleeced. I'm not sure that the original article's "proliferation" claim is true - there have always been a lot of ways the unwary will pay for investing, but knowing that there is a need for caution is the first step towards NOT being a patsy.
Getting involved with Vanguard early on through my company's 401(k) plan was another good thing. Understanding the limits on my abilities, and investing mostly in no-load, small administrative fee index mutual funds managed by Vanguard helped me make the most of what I had over the last 30 years. Boring and safe has worked out very well.
Since when is this news for people who exchanged all their humanity for money?
If the saying "early is on time, on time is late" had a corollary in personal economics, it would go something like this: "Investing is keeping up, saving is falling behind."
Investing is a normal activity for people to engage in, especially since interest rates on ordinary savings accounts haven't been keeping up with inflation for quite a while. I don't think you have to have exchanged all of your humanity for money to have some concern for how a confusing fee landscape might impact an ordinary mortal's putting money away for a rainy day/retirement. Nerds who have managed to get a little ahead might be very interested in understanding how to avoid being fleeced while investing.
Really? Go there and attempt to set up a Church. See how far that gets you.
Pardon? I don't think you would get too far if you were setting up a Christian church. Setting up a mosque, on the other hand, would probably work (as long as it was the right sort of mosque).
So the US is a medieval theocracy that murders with volts?
I believe that there are three different claims being made in the statement:
Saudi Arabia is a theocracy
Saudi Arabia is medieval
Saudi Arabia uses "beheading by sword" as a method of capital punishment
I don't see a claim that "beheading by sword" makes Saudi Arabia a medieval theocracy, so it does not logically follow that the United States would be a medieval theocracy that "murders with volts".
So the claim that "Saudi Arabia is a medieval theocracy that still beheads by sword" seems to me to be based on a set of independent facts. I don't see evidence of a claim that the manner of execution determines whether a nation-state is a medieval theocracy.
The US service providers who provide "broadband" access worked assiduously to reduce the amount of information services they were providing (personal web sites, e-mail, ftp servers, Usenet news services) leaving serving us with almost nothing but telecommunications services. We don't sign up with ISPs for their information services, we sign up with them for telecommunications. What we want now is for those telecommunications to be provided on an unrestricted basis as a common carrier service so that our only access to the Internet is as devoid of trickery as possible.
Automating coupons and loyalty cards takes the consumer out of the game, and the consumer needs to be involved in the game in order to increase the consumer's spending. The consumer needs to feel like they are winning something based on their personal ability so that they stay engaged in the game. (Which is ultimately about the store selling more, not the store providing just what the consumer needs at the lowest possible price.)
I am often regarded as being a cheap bastard, but even I don't try to shop using coupons. Sure... if I actually need something, and there happens to be a coupon easily available for that thing that I already determined that I need, I'll use a coupon. But experience tells me it isn't very likely to happen.
The coupons I get in the mail and on receipts are almost always for things that I don't need, don't want, and typically don't buy. The "Value Pack" that comes in the mail goes straight to recycling for that reason. Could 'clipping coupons' ever pay me back the time to clip, sort, store, and retrieve the coupons in the first place? Am I really saving money when I get $0.50 off of something I probably wouldn't have bought in the first place? I've found that I spent a lot less money once I stopped reading the Sunday paper (where 50% of the bulk is advertising material of one sort or another). [Yes, this dates me somewhat now that newspapers have practically ceased to exist as physical artifacts.] Show me a coupon where I can save 10% or even 25%, and I'll show you a way to save 100%.
I think the trick of the "coupon game" is to get people thinking that they are "winning" by saving money using a coupon (or a store loyalty card) while eliminating the critical thinking of whether they actually need the item in question (or whether a cheaper alternative like a generic is available). It seems like something thought up by people like this: https://blog.vendhq.com/post/64901826173/encourage-impulse-buys-store-deeper-look-unplanned-purchases. Perhaps part of the underlying process is converting a "do I need this" decision into a trade-off analysis (with low cognitive effort required for the trade-off analysis); the "buy it or don't buy it" comparison becomes "which one of these is the better deal" comparison. The latter is much more easily solved than the former when you have a 25% off coupon!
It was so successful that over time I was asked to list every member of staff, whether they were in or not, the time they last tagged in/out, plus the people who aren't even supposed to be here, plus all the temporary visitors, plus the other sites, plus.... and then do it twice at both ends of the site so the duty of checking it can be split and we have a "backup".
If you read the article, you will see graphic evidence that the printers in question are usually thermal printers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_printing) so no ink cartridges are involved. Maybe that is the intended technology takeaway from the article?
Somebody explain to me with a straight face how Walmart can patent something that I've seen in use for a good 4.5 years now.
Because on computers is old, but this is "on a shopping cart".
"on a shopping cart AND with a computer"! Yet another innovative application! "on a shopping cart AND with a computer AND on a weekday!" (Patent lawyers discover untold realms of innovation available through Boolean expressions [patent pending])
Seems more like Walmart is providing its security personnel earlier notification of potential threats.
I can't help but think there is probably some way that they plan to monetize this. Track customers, see what they get excited about as they roam the store, use that information to alter their displays and product selection to maximize revenue?
Does the United States really need a service that makes suing people easier? Automation that removes "natural" limits of process rates (like the time/effort to file a suit) often cause disruption in other parts of the system that haven't evolved to handle the load that can be presented once the "natural" limit is removed. Or perhaps this was the intent?
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, the Oracle sales teams sell to the senior executives. Although the database product isn't complete crap, it was adopted far beyond its technical merits warranted when I worked with it (late 1980s). My Significant Other has worked with it extensively since then, and reports that Oracle and the Oracle layered products still hold an unholy fascination with the senior executives. She has spent 3 years demonstrating the flexibility and cost effectiveness of other products at her workplace, but some senior managers there persist in repeating their "discovery projects" (to identify the best technology) until the right answer (Oracle) is produced by the technical staff.
Another good reason not to install any more apps than you really need to on your smartphone. I use the browser wherever possible. The risk of giving someone else's code the authority to execute on my hardware if I can access the info I want through the browser isn't worth it.
I also reset the advertising ID every once in a while, and set "Limit Ad Tracking" on, and clear the history and website data regularly. It would be nice if Apple would build in a single button to do this... perhaps give it a cute name like "Data flush"; they could even play a sound effect like a flushing toilet when you press the button.
Your electric company may have already replaced your traditional meter with an electronic meter that monitors your energy consumption on a very fine-grained basis; the data from these meters is already being collected by the utilities. Researchers at UMass showed that they could determine what loads were being switched on and off inside a home with such a meter. Nest smoke detectors monitor "presence" information on a room-by-room basis and feed it up to the cloud. If you have cloud-based "smart home" devices (room by room presence, electrical switch state, thermostat/temperature state, door monitoring, etc., then they are feeding the state of your home to the cloud, where it can be used to determine what the people in your home are doing. If you are using geo-fencing with your smartphone, your location is being fed into these cloud systems (quite apart from the "ordinary" concerns about cell company location monitoring). If you have video/audio devices that feed into the cloud, people with access to that information can observe/monitor directly what the people in your home are doing.
The ability to pull all this information together may involved inter-corporate agreements or a government mandate, but it obviously enables a kind of surveillance that makes past court cases involving thermal scanners being used to peep inside dwellings charming glimpses of a less intrusive era. The fact that there is a) no legislation regarding the protection of privacy, and b) very low public awareness of the risks involved, make it very unlikely that the brakes will be applied to the adoption of these systems any time soon. We are bugging our own homes; the panopticon isn't something the government will force upon us, it is something we are building that the corporations/government need merely to tap into.
Never take jobs at companies that produce commodities
IT in general was a lot more fun when hardware was really really expensive. When it cost $500,000 to $1,000,000 to buy one computer that supported an entire engineering office, the five or so acolytes that it took to run the machine were treated very well. Now that it costs on the order of $500 for the hardware for one person, the two or three IT janitors who are taking care of everything for several hundred people are squeezed tight as if paying them any more would bankrupt the company.
Commodities are great for the consumers, not so great for the providers. A lot of conversations in commodity supply chains are about reducing costs, as it is the only way to make more (probably temporary) profit.
I used to work for a somewhat enlightened company that ensured all workers had offices (with doors). Unfortunately I was a consultant/contractor, and over time our customers (federal government) chose to house contractors working on-site in densely-packed cube farms (with as many as 4 of us to a cube that might house one government worker). My productivity went steadily down as distractions went up. Even work-related discussions (but not related to the problem I was working on) steal my attention if keywords or subjects that affect me come up. Some of us took to wearing headphones, but that was eventually discouraged because it was unsightly and went against the "team" atmosphere. Sigh.
No matter if someone say cost isn't a factor... cost is a factor.
Using them in sexual videos without their consent should be considered sexual assult.
That would be contrary to the plain definition of assault: "make a physical attack on" and even the extended legal (in some jurisdictions) definition fo assault: "a credible threat or attempt to cause battery" (where battery refers to the actual bodily contact). I'm not arguing against the idea that using someone's likeness in photos or videos without their consent being illegal, just the idea that it be labeled as "assault." Otherwise, this would dilute the definition of assault. Perhaps someone could come up with a more appropriate label apart from borrowing one from a different kind illegal act.
I don't understand how a normal person can be against net neutrality. Can someone explain?
As someone who thought the need for "common carrier" status for broadband Internet access communication services to the home was fairly obvious, I share your confusion. There are a couple of issues at play, I think:
Once the conversation strays from classifying broadband Internet access communication services as a "common carrier" service to Net Neutrality, the various definitions of what Net Neutrality is, and how it would be protected and guaranteed, get into the mix. A key factor here is "network management" concerns, sometimes expressed as (1) "Net Neutrality" would block all possibility of managing traffic flows and (2) without managing traffic flows certain types of traffic would naturally overwhelm other types of traffic and then (3) service would go to hell and (4) there would be nothing a carrier could do about it so (5) we would all suffer. So a normal person might become concerned that Net Neutrality will cause their quality of service to become significantly degraded. At least, that is what some of the major telecommunications service firms have implied.
Some telecommunications vendors claim that Net Neutrality would hamper their ability to deliver "innovative" types of services. Without knowing what this means, and without having any experience to draw upon to guess what this might mean, a normal person could come to conclude that a lack of innovation would be bad, and keep them from enjoying the future benefits of these innovative services.
So there are two reasons why a normal person could be against Net Neutrality. I'm sure that there are others.
I happen to believe that these two reasons, and other arguments that I have heard, are all self-serving justifications from greedy near-monopolies that are seeking to maximize their profit and have determined that they can best do so by avoiding/undoing the commoditization of Internet access. They didn't bring about the innovation that was the Internet, the innovation of making Internet access ubiquitously available to practically every household, nor the innovative services on the Internet that drives Internet usage even higher, but they damn well want to be the gatekeepers that "innovatively" control our ability to make use of all of these innovations. They do their damndest to convince everyone that the wealth of good that comes from the Internet is there by their doing, despite the fact that the range of services provided by ISPs has steadily declined from the days of the neighborhood dial-up ISPs to today.
There *might* have been glimmers of argument that ISPs were "information service providers" in the days when ISPs provided network news, web-site hosting, mail services, and more to their customers. Once the big telcos systematically gobbled up all of those ISPs and turned off most of these services, leaving just Internet access behind, the idea that they were anything but telecommunications service providers was laughable. CompuServe, America On-line, Prodigy and others from the 1990s provided actual information services in the days before the web. They sold you dial-up to THEIR hosted services and content. The Internet changed all of that... an Internet user could access everyone's content, not just the content of their provider. And that changed the game.
Which service is relatively new and might have more open addresses. How do I get my 50k emails OUT of gmail and the IN to the new service.
Register your own domain name and have whatever e-mail address you want, including your full name if you like. There are domain registrars that even offer e-mail services: Hover, for one. It will cost you a relatively small amount of money on a recurring basis to host your e-mail with a provider like Hover, but it saves you the hassle of running your own e-mail server and it will give you complete control over your address.
I have not attempted this on the scale which you name (50,000 e-mail messages) but consider trying IMAP as the way to get your messages off of Google and stored locally to your e-mail client or even onto another IMAP server if you like. I did it on a much smaller scale when I switched ISPs from Verizon to Comcast. I hope it goes without saying that you won't have your actual Gmail address in the new service.
That's not really true. A lot of small-time investors are invested in funds that charge significant fees based on the amount invested. Almost all mutual funds have some sort of percentage fee, though it is quite small for the better index funds. On top of that, many retail investors are paying a "financial adviser" (really a salesperson) a percentage of assets under management (often 1-1.5%). Total fees can easily be greater than 2% a year. That doesn't sound like much, but if you are a retired person, that amount represents HALF your annual income (not including social security). The sad thing is that all these fees are rarely necessary. Simply investing in low-fee index funds from the likes of Vanguard or Fidelity gets your fees down to a nominal level (like .05%). Indeed, trading makes no sense for the retail investor, but fees on trades are rarely the biggest fees retail investors pay.
Well said. The best book I ever read was https://www.amazon.com/Only-Investment-Guide-Youll-Ever/dp/0547447256. Coming from a blue-collar background with no family history of success in money management beyond my parent's getting a VA-backed mortgage, I bought it after I had gotten out in the workforce in a tech job and started wondering what I should be doing with my excess cash (a novel concept to me). I made some cautious trades in individual stocks and some options, guided by a broker who had picked me up in his stable of marks, but didn't know how to know what I was doing. This book, along with my own experiences and other information gleaned here and there, helped me understand how to NOT get fleeced. I'm not sure that the original article's "proliferation" claim is true - there have always been a lot of ways the unwary will pay for investing, but knowing that there is a need for caution is the first step towards NOT being a patsy.
Getting involved with Vanguard early on through my company's 401(k) plan was another good thing. Understanding the limits on my abilities, and investing mostly in no-load, small administrative fee index mutual funds managed by Vanguard helped me make the most of what I had over the last 30 years. Boring and safe has worked out very well.
Since when is this news for people who exchanged all their humanity for money?
If the saying "early is on time, on time is late" had a corollary in personal economics, it would go something like this: "Investing is keeping up, saving is falling behind."
Investing is a normal activity for people to engage in, especially since interest rates on ordinary savings accounts haven't been keeping up with inflation for quite a while. I don't think you have to have exchanged all of your humanity for money to have some concern for how a confusing fee landscape might impact an ordinary mortal's putting money away for a rainy day/retirement. Nerds who have managed to get a little ahead might be very interested in understanding how to avoid being fleeced while investing.
Really? Go there and attempt to set up a Church. See how far that gets you.
Pardon? I don't think you would get too far if you were setting up a Christian church. Setting up a mosque, on the other hand, would probably work (as long as it was the right sort of mosque).
A medieval theocracy that still beheads by sword
So the US is a medieval theocracy that murders with volts?
I believe that there are three different claims being made in the statement:
Saudi Arabia is a theocracy
Saudi Arabia is medieval
Saudi Arabia uses "beheading by sword" as a method of capital punishment
I don't see a claim that "beheading by sword" makes Saudi Arabia a medieval theocracy, so it does not logically follow that the United States would be a medieval theocracy that "murders with volts".
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia Saudi Arabia is a theocracy. Depending upon one's point of view, there are aspects of Saudi Arabian society that appear to not have progressed beyond what Europe practiced in the European medieval period. Saudi Arabia does use beheading as a method of capital punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_Arabia.
So the claim that "Saudi Arabia is a medieval theocracy that still beheads by sword" seems to me to be based on a set of independent facts. I don't see evidence of a claim that the manner of execution determines whether a nation-state is a medieval theocracy.
The US service providers who provide "broadband" access worked assiduously to reduce the amount of information services they were providing (personal web sites, e-mail, ftp servers, Usenet news services) leaving serving us with almost nothing but telecommunications services. We don't sign up with ISPs for their information services, we sign up with them for telecommunications. What we want now is for those telecommunications to be provided on an unrestricted basis as a common carrier service so that our only access to the Internet is as devoid of trickery as possible.
Let me guess... the folks who already think everyone else should stop eating meat, I bet.
Automating coupons and loyalty cards takes the consumer out of the game, and the consumer needs to be involved in the game in order to increase the consumer's spending. The consumer needs to feel like they are winning something based on their personal ability so that they stay engaged in the game. (Which is ultimately about the store selling more, not the store providing just what the consumer needs at the lowest possible price.)
But have you been to the fire swamp?
I am often regarded as being a cheap bastard, but even I don't try to shop using coupons. Sure... if I actually need something, and there happens to be a coupon easily available for that thing that I already determined that I need, I'll use a coupon. But experience tells me it isn't very likely to happen.
The coupons I get in the mail and on receipts are almost always for things that I don't need, don't want, and typically don't buy. The "Value Pack" that comes in the mail goes straight to recycling for that reason. Could 'clipping coupons' ever pay me back the time to clip, sort, store, and retrieve the coupons in the first place? Am I really saving money when I get $0.50 off of something I probably wouldn't have bought in the first place? I've found that I spent a lot less money once I stopped reading the Sunday paper (where 50% of the bulk is advertising material of one sort or another). [Yes, this dates me somewhat now that newspapers have practically ceased to exist as physical artifacts.] Show me a coupon where I can save 10% or even 25%, and I'll show you a way to save 100%.
I think the trick of the "coupon game" is to get people thinking that they are "winning" by saving money using a coupon (or a store loyalty card) while eliminating the critical thinking of whether they actually need the item in question (or whether a cheaper alternative like a generic is available). It seems like something thought up by people like this: https://blog.vendhq.com/post/64901826173/encourage-impulse-buys-store-deeper-look-unplanned-purchases. Perhaps part of the underlying process is converting a "do I need this" decision into a trade-off analysis (with low cognitive effort required for the trade-off analysis); the "buy it or don't buy it" comparison becomes "which one of these is the better deal" comparison. The latter is much more easily solved than the former when you have a 25% off coupon!
It was so successful that over time I was asked to list every member of staff, whether they were in or not, the time they last tagged in/out, plus the people who aren't even supposed to be here, plus all the temporary visitors, plus the other sites, plus.... and then do it twice at both ends of the site so the duty of checking it can be split and we have a "backup".
No good deed goes unpunished.
nearly impossible to parse a CVS file
And a comma-separated value (CSV) file is only sightly easier.
the ink cartridges
If you read the article, you will see graphic evidence that the printers in question are usually thermal printers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_printing) so no ink cartridges are involved. Maybe that is the intended technology takeaway from the article?
overpriced convenience store
Overpriced? How can that be when the name comes from "Consumer Value Store"?
Somebody explain to me with a straight face how Walmart can patent something that I've seen in use for a good 4.5 years now.
Because on computers is old, but this is "on a shopping cart".
"on a shopping cart AND with a computer"! Yet another innovative application! "on a shopping cart AND with a computer AND on a weekday!" (Patent lawyers discover untold realms of innovation available through Boolean expressions [patent pending])
Seems more like Walmart is providing its security personnel earlier notification of potential threats.
I can't help but think there is probably some way that they plan to monetize this. Track customers, see what they get excited about as they roam the store, use that information to alter their displays and product selection to maximize revenue?
Does the United States really need a service that makes suing people easier? Automation that removes "natural" limits of process rates (like the time/effort to file a suit) often cause disruption in other parts of the system that haven't evolved to handle the load that can be presented once the "natural" limit is removed. Or perhaps this was the intent?