You guys are all *exactly* missing the point. The point is that the public domain is a very important resource, *not* just where useless stuff goes when it isn't worth anything anymore. We *have* to educate people about the value of having things go into the public domain, or else there's no reason for the general public to argue against things like the Sonny Bono Act... they don't realize what they're losing.
Under reasonable copyright law, the song ought to be in the public domain *without* the technicality. We need things like that available without a nest of legal entanglements, exactly so that things like the JibJab video can be produced. Imagine how many other things like that we're missing because some guy had a brilliant idea but didn't want to brave potential lawsuits to share it with us.
Culture is the poorer because of unlimited copyright.
The one surprise in the archive.org archives is the lack of real feature films, I mean, how many studios went bust in the 20s, 30s and 40s and did their successors in interest all renew the copyright on their backcatalogues?
Read Free Culture for some interesting bits on this... it doesn't help that stuff is in the public domain if there are no publicly-available copies. The studios were allowed to check their own films out of the Library of Congress, indefinitely and without charge, so there aren't any copies there, so the only remaining copies are dissolving to dust on studio shelves.
But is turnitin.com any more ethical?
on
Cheating Made Easy
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· Score: 1
I block turnitin.com and a number of similar spiders from my sites for the simple reason that they eat my bandwidth for their own profit. They're not a search engine sending me traffic... I gain *nothing* from the transaction, but I have to bear the cost of it. Yes, it's a trivial cost, but so is the cost of each individual bit of spam. Same principle.
Then the domain doesn't fully resolve to your router.
Our ISP let us; it goes with the static IP. Anything else, and you might as well be a zombie.
bounce it and I'll know. Just dropping it is pretty unhelpful
That's true. We have zombie-blocking, but it happens at SMTP level and sends an appropriate error message. Sadly, nobody (short of us gearheads) reads those.
Goes for most people running a local mail server on their home DSL/Cable account
I've got a local mail server on a home (but business-level) DSL account, and I don't have this problem; we reverse-DNS just fine.
I can't think of any *other* way to distinguish a zombie box from a setup like yours, so I'd have to say: domain names are cheap. If you can't attach one to your server, you should find a different way to send mail.
The only telemarketing calls I've gotten have been for two magazines I stopped subscribing to. One call for each, and that was the end of it, and if I'd forgotten to renew my subscription the calls would actually have been useful.
I wouldn't complain at *all* about a do-not-spam list with the same "no power."
Anyway, how would something like this hold up in a spam blocking function?
Ultimately, not all that well: if everyone could go to a perfect whitelist, with user-transparent verifications and all that hoohah, all that would happen would be that spammers would start forging the addresses of real people onto their spams.
You'd have to start combining that with SPF and perhaps some even more restrictive confirmations to really make it effective.
(And BTW, as long as I'm already replying: the phrase you wanted was "chock full.")
Don't clickety-click on everything on your screen. Some of those links are bad.
Could be worse. Your mother could, as mine does, insist that she *wants* to use Uproar, and she's perfectly happy registering with a throwaway address... but giving them her real mailing address, because they mail her prizes (two cheapo DVD players, to date).
We had a tense discussion about what Roar *is*, and how they and spammers like them have cost *me* a lot of time trying to keep my hobby mailing-list server spam-free, and whether her two DVD players were worth supporting companies that were destroying something I've put 18 years of my life into.
She still uses Uproar, and gets very annoyed when Spyware S&D "breaks" things.
Depends on the user, though. You take a machine like my mother's, you have all kinds of wacky stuff (at least up until recently): she had a Glyffic pad, which is a tetchy little critter that isn't Plug-n-Play. (Or rather, it is, but it detects as a different sort of mouse than it really is, which is worse as every time the machine reboots it wants to "fix" it.) She also had no less than four different parallel-port devices, on two ports, including a DOS-based(!) card programmer for an electronic embroidery machine, a wacky little Sharp PDA-organizer thingy, and a scanner that fought with every other device on the system.
Juggling interrupts and drivers that goofed up other drivers could easily eat up 10.5 *days* on *that* box. And that's with the previously-mentioned tactic of upgrading the hard drive and slaving the old one to mine for drivers.
Mercifully, the embroidery machine finally entered the 90's with Windows-based software, the Glyffic died (unmourned, and I suspect foul play), I gave her a USB scanner for Christmas, and she bought a USB printer. It's *much* easier to maintain now. But I bet it'd take 10.5 hours for a fresh install nonetheless, just because of all the software, and getting it back to exactly the way she wanted it set up. Home setups tend toward the idiosyncratic, and you don't get the luxury of saying "It's company policy, you don't get to change the setup."
Um, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but I'm typing this on a fully-working Win95 install, which has been on there for more than 5 years. And I *do* connect to the net much. (Okay, behind a Linux server, so it's not like I'm all the way out there connected.)
I'm not sure it's "impressive," though. I'd say rather just lazy. I actually have a Debian box (a 333 to replace this 133, yet!) sitting here next to it to replace it, and haven't gotten around to actually plugging it into the network.
(And they all moved away from me, there on the Group W bench. But then I said "But I spend most of my time in a shell on the Linux servers either way," and they all moved back over...)
Assuming they get to keep "gmail.com," which is what all the email addresses are. And given that a lot of people use Google to archive the mailing lists they subscribe to, changing that is nontrivial.
(Of course, if they retained the same usernames and just swapped the domain name, some of us mailing-list providers would just search-and-replace. But I rather doubt YahooGroups would, nor all the little one- and two-list places that people might be subscribed to.)
I was thinking that whatever it takes to get young people (kids and young adults) into the library is a good thing.
Well, there's that, I guess. But I'd expect to really get kids in you'd have to also pander to all the latest franchised properties, and I'm not sure that's really worth it.
On a tangent, I consider most country I hear to be a form of pop music, but it's not all that way. I could listen to Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson all day, but I can't stand 5 minutes of the crap you hear on country stations around here.
I don't mind the pop country any more than the pop rock (which is to say, it's okay for wallpaper, I guess), and aside from the occasional accent I'm not sure there's a difference anymore.
Recently I've been listening to the Mexican equivalent of country music.
One of the former pop stations here switched over to that, so I listen occasionally, but my Spanish has corroded so much I only pick up about one word in five. I should listen more often to refresh it, I guess.
And yeah, on the accordians and tubas... I used to work at a company that was almost entirely South and Central American. Company picnics were entirely C y R at full volume. (Estos van a once...) It's okay, but if I'm gonna listen to an accordian I'd rather it was Weird Al or some good zydeco.
And I'd bet the opposite. Oh, wait, it's Kansas we're talking about.
Yep. Did I mention I lived there? Er, here? Granted, I only have experience with the Wichita library system, which is a far cry from your average small-town library, but they still don't have a vast selection of pop music. Which is, I have to admit, as *I* think it should be. You can, after all, listen to all that on the radio, whereas the library probably ought to carry stuff that's less readily accessible. (Of course, here we start to get into the whole ClearChannel every-station's-the-same issue, which is hardly unique to Kansas.) We've got very little in the way of blues, or new-age/eclectic/lifestyle/whatever-they-call-it-t hese-days, or anything not hypercommercialized outside of a couple of one-hour-a-week shows at odd hours.
Then again, now that I think about it, maybe your rural Kansas areas *are* pop-music-deficient; I seem to recall picking up nothing but country music when on the road.
It's totally toothless, and actually helps the record companies, imho.
I don't think you'll get any argument from anybody on that one.
The actions of the AG are just the actions of a politician using this as an opportunity to grind his axe and further make a name for himself at the expense of liberty.
Maybe. I think rather he should have said "We're sending them *all* back, and here's a list of guidelines from Kansas libraries. Try again." But that should have happened at settlement time, so...
What smacks of censorship in a big way is that the state attorney general is doing an end run around library sustem policies, dictating what the libraries can and cannot receive, based on his conservative moral standards.
I'd be willing to bet, though, that what got rejected *is* pretty close to what's in library system policies. They're pretty conservative about what they buy, especially in pop music. (Maybe censorship, maybe practicality: limited "staying power," a higher tendency to walk out the door without being checked out, etc.) OTOH, I'm not familiar enough with the accepted/rejected list (as mommy to a preschooler, my listening habits these days tend more toward Wee Sing and VeggieTales) to say for sure there.
And I'd question whether it would be practical or legally possible for individual library systems to do any rejections. They're not the ones who agreed to the settlement, and the record companies could probably say "Oh, Small Town X rejected Album Y? Okay, we'll replace it as soon as you shop it to every other library in the state."
Bad example, though. Ford Escort owners don't need to have their car stolen; they can just set it on fire. Or rather, just fail to prevent it from setting itself on fire. Problem solved.
It's not "censorship" at all, at least not at that level. They certainly *ought* to reject anything that's not something the library system would have purchased under their current guidelines... these (wait a minute, I should shout this) THESE ARE NOT FREE CDs. These are discs that we ("we" being the CD-buying populace, including library systems) were, in essence, fraudulently charged for, so they darn well be giving us something we *would* pay for.
(Now, if you object overall to a library system's policies on what they purchase, that's a completely different issue.)
Maybe this is very uninformed but it seems to me most players, except some slot-loading ones, could accomodate a 1mm thicker disc without problems at all.
I'll add anecdotal evidence to this. Confusing as heck to pull a disc off a spindle, put it in, and have some other disc start playing, open the drive, confirm it's the disc you thought it was, spend a few moments wondering who's playing a joke on you and how, and then realize that it's two discs with static cling.
If the same article is on multiple sites not giving the MSN site precedence would be plain poor bidness. That's if they really do mean the *same* exact article.
Meanwhile, speaking of Google vs. Microsoft, I just got some mail from a Hotmail user, inquiring about the church budget (which I prepare) for her department. Lots of happy financial keywords, and what's the random(?) ad-sig? "Overwhelmed by debt? Find out how to ~QDig Yourself Out of Debt~R from MSN Money." (~Q and ~R are exactly as seen... Pine apparently doesn't like MS's "smart" quotes.)
So, is that really random, or is MS doing what everyone's coming unglued over Google doing?
I am guessing that you don't cook much because baking and cooking are two different worlds. Baking has a lot of standard recipes and very precise measurements. Cooking is much more free form.
There's still a large amount of room for tinkering in cookie recipes (after all, there's a lot more out there than chocolate chip). Granted you have to keep certain things in balance (more so than in other sorts of cooking), but there's still a great deal of flavor difference between using molasses, brown sugar, or white sugar as your sweetener, just as a for-instance, so I don't think it's that bad of an analogy.
We bought a fridge there. White-Westinghouse. No PSP.
Before six months were up, the thing had failed catastrophically twice, and the repair guys (provided by White-Westinghouse under the factory warranty, not Best Buy's) had managed to screw it up worse. We ended up with a fridge that had been "waiting for parts" for longer than it had been keeping our food cold. What was White-Westinghouse's oh-so-generous response? They graciously offered to extend our warranty by adding six months to the end. Be STILL my freakin' HEART!
I ended up calling Best Buy's corporate customer-service line. He gave me a number to call at White-Westinghouse for Best-Buy-specific customer service, and said if that didn't get results, call him back. It didn't get results (I think that's actually when they finally offered to extend the warranty), so I called the guy at Best Buy Back, and said I wanted a new refrigerator, of a different brand. I ended up with a new fridge (a Whirlpool), free pickup/delivery and an icemaker thrown into the bargain. Twelve years later, the Whirlpool is still happily working fine.
Now, that's the appliance end of things, and not the electronics, so I dunno if there's a difference. Only other bad appliance story I have is shopping for a dishwasher, and having a slimy salesman at Montgomery Ward telling me not to go to Best Buy, because they were about to stop selling their large appliances and we'd have trouble getting any warranty work. That was ten years ago, and Best Buy is still selling appliances, and MW's not selling much of anything at all. (We didn't buy the dishwasher there, though, as I recall.)
That said, though, if there'd been any silliness about "rebates" or such, we wouldn't have bought the fridge there in the first place...
Actually, back in the olden days the garage doors *would* open. As I recall, they just waited for a signal (even noise) on a certain frequency. Nowadays they're a little more sophisticated.
My folks had a heck of a time with one opening by itself all the time, and finally had to have Sears come out and fix it, by adjusting the frequency it was expecting to something that was *not* one used by a nearby airport or whatever.
Too bad part 15 of the FCC's guidelines can't apply.
It should, just not in the way you're thinking:
Whatever they had running was so strong, it completely fried the system.
That's what the "must accept interference" part comes in.
Of course, the idea of going to Olds and saying "Your stuff violated part 15 because it didn't accept FCC-legal interference. So replace it with something that does, or I'm siccing the FCC on you!" is probably not terribly workable.
I'm piggy-backing to point out to the below-my-threshold previous poster that there's no reason not to shop thrift stores for computer equipment. Trust me, you *won't* be cheating some poor person out of it... there'll be ten more in the back, and they'll have turned away donations of three dozen more for lack of space. Better you give your cash to the thrift store, which is hopefully also a fundraising servie.
Heck, I've got a whole box of keyboards and mice (Compaqs) that have floated around in the back of my van for a few weeks because I haven't gotten around to taking them to the thrift store. (Leftovers from the church garage sale, donated by a local hospital that was about to fill a Dumpster with P333s rather than pay $800 worth of MS licensing on each of them. We sold all the computers, but most people already had keyboards and mice, and the latter already outnumbered the CPUs.)
Old (and not-so-old; some people dump mice and all when they buy a new computer every two or three years) computer equipment is *not* a scarce commodity.
Now, as to your post directly:
The Microsoft keyboards I have used all have had very soft key action.
That's been my experience. I don't like the Natural, because it's, well, unnatural, but I've also used an MS-branded "conventional" keyboard, and it's definitely one of the weird squishy type.
(Granted that my keyboard preferences may have been skewed at an early age by learning to type on a Color Computer's "chiclet" keyboard...)
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You guys are all *exactly* missing the point. The point is that the public domain is a very important resource, *not* just where useless stuff goes when it isn't worth anything anymore. We *have* to educate people about the value of having things go into the public domain, or else there's no reason for the general public to argue against things like the Sonny Bono Act... they don't realize what they're losing.
Under reasonable copyright law, the song ought to be in the public domain *without* the technicality. We need things like that available without a nest of legal entanglements, exactly so that things like the JibJab video can be produced. Imagine how many other things like that we're missing because some guy had a brilliant idea but didn't want to brave potential lawsuits to share it with us.
Culture is the poorer because of unlimited copyright.
The one surprise in the archive.org archives is the lack of real feature films, I mean, how many studios went bust in the 20s, 30s and 40s and did their successors in interest all renew the copyright on their backcatalogues?
Read Free Culture for some interesting bits on this... it doesn't help that stuff is in the public domain if there are no publicly-available copies. The studios were allowed to check their own films out of the Library of Congress, indefinitely and without charge, so there aren't any copies there, so the only remaining copies are dissolving to dust on studio shelves.
I block turnitin.com and a number of similar spiders from my sites for the simple reason that they eat my bandwidth for their own profit. They're not a search engine sending me traffic... I gain *nothing* from the transaction, but I have to bear the cost of it. Yes, it's a trivial cost, but so is the cost of each individual bit of spam. Same principle.
My ISP doesn't let me alter the rDNS
Then the domain doesn't fully resolve to your router.
Our ISP let us; it goes with the static IP. Anything else, and you might as well be a zombie.
bounce it and I'll know. Just dropping it is pretty unhelpful
That's true. We have zombie-blocking, but it happens at SMTP level and sends an appropriate error message. Sadly, nobody (short of us gearheads) reads those.
Goes for most people running a local mail server on their home DSL/Cable account
I've got a local mail server on a home (but business-level) DSL account, and I don't have this problem; we reverse-DNS just fine.
I can't think of any *other* way to distinguish a zombie box from a setup like yours, so I'd have to say: domain names are cheap. If you can't attach one to your server, you should find a different way to send mail.
the do-not-call list has no power
It doesn't? It's worked darn well for me.
The only telemarketing calls I've gotten have been for two magazines I stopped subscribing to. One call for each, and that was the end of it, and if I'd forgotten to renew my subscription the calls would actually have been useful.
I wouldn't complain at *all* about a do-not-spam list with the same "no power."
I do think it would be better if it were possible to change the UID string for specific sites,
I'm pretty sure Privoxy lets you do this, FWIW.
Anyway, how would something like this hold up in a spam blocking function?
Ultimately, not all that well: if everyone could go to a perfect whitelist, with user-transparent verifications and all that hoohah, all that would happen would be that spammers would start forging the addresses of real people onto their spams.
You'd have to start combining that with SPF and perhaps some even more restrictive confirmations to really make it effective.
(And BTW, as long as I'm already replying: the phrase you wanted was "chock full.")
Don't clickety-click on everything on your screen. Some of those links are bad.
Could be worse. Your mother could, as mine does, insist that she *wants* to use Uproar, and she's perfectly happy registering with a throwaway address... but giving them her real mailing address, because they mail her prizes (two cheapo DVD players, to date).
We had a tense discussion about what Roar *is*, and how they and spammers like them have cost *me* a lot of time trying to keep my hobby mailing-list server spam-free, and whether her two DVD players were worth supporting companies that were destroying something I've put 18 years of my life into.
She still uses Uproar, and gets very annoyed when Spyware S&D "breaks" things.
Sigh.
Depends on the user, though. You take a machine like my mother's, you have all kinds of wacky stuff (at least up until recently): she had a Glyffic pad, which is a tetchy little critter that isn't Plug-n-Play. (Or rather, it is, but it detects as a different sort of mouse than it really is, which is worse as every time the machine reboots it wants to "fix" it.) She also had no less than four different parallel-port devices, on two ports, including a DOS-based(!) card programmer for an electronic embroidery machine, a wacky little Sharp PDA-organizer thingy, and a scanner that fought with every other device on the system.
Juggling interrupts and drivers that goofed up other drivers could easily eat up 10.5 *days* on *that* box. And that's with the previously-mentioned tactic of upgrading the hard drive and slaving the old one to mine for drivers.
Mercifully, the embroidery machine finally entered the 90's with Windows-based software, the Glyffic died (unmourned, and I suspect foul play), I gave her a USB scanner for Christmas, and she bought a USB printer. It's *much* easier to maintain now. But I bet it'd take 10.5 hours for a fresh install nonetheless, just because of all the software, and getting it back to exactly the way she wanted it set up. Home setups tend toward the idiosyncratic, and you don't get the luxury of saying "It's company policy, you don't get to change the setup."
Um, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but I'm typing this on a fully-working Win95 install, which has been on there for more than 5 years. And I *do* connect to the net much. (Okay, behind a Linux server, so it's not like I'm all the way out there connected.)
I'm not sure it's "impressive," though. I'd say rather just lazy. I actually have a Debian box (a 333 to replace this 133, yet!) sitting here next to it to replace it, and haven't gotten around to actually plugging it into the network.
(And they all moved away from me, there on the Group W bench. But then I said "But I spend most of my time in a shell on the Linux servers either way," and they all moved back over...)
Assuming they get to keep "gmail.com," which is what all the email addresses are. And given that a lot of people use Google to archive the mailing lists they subscribe to, changing that is nontrivial.
(Of course, if they retained the same usernames and just swapped the domain name, some of us mailing-list providers would just search-and-replace. But I rather doubt YahooGroups would, nor all the little one- and two-list places that people might be subscribed to.)
I was thinking that whatever it takes to get young people (kids and young adults) into the library is a good thing.
Well, there's that, I guess. But I'd expect to really get kids in you'd have to also pander to all the latest franchised properties, and I'm not sure that's really worth it.
On a tangent, I consider most country I hear to be a form of pop music, but it's not all that way. I could listen to Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson all day, but I can't stand 5 minutes of the crap you hear on country stations around here.
I don't mind the pop country any more than the pop rock (which is to say, it's okay for wallpaper, I guess), and aside from the occasional accent I'm not sure there's a difference anymore.
Recently I've been listening to the Mexican equivalent of country music.
One of the former pop stations here switched over to that, so I listen occasionally, but my Spanish has corroded so much I only pick up about one word in five. I should listen more often to refresh it, I guess.
And yeah, on the accordians and tubas... I used to work at a company that was almost entirely South and Central American. Company picnics were entirely C y R at full volume. (Estos van a once...) It's okay, but if I'm gonna listen to an accordian I'd rather it was Weird Al or some good zydeco.
And I'd bet the opposite. Oh, wait, it's Kansas we're talking about.
t hese-days, or anything not hypercommercialized outside of a couple of one-hour-a-week shows at odd hours.
Yep. Did I mention I lived there? Er, here? Granted, I only have experience with the Wichita library system, which is a far cry from your average small-town library, but they still don't have a vast selection of pop music. Which is, I have to admit, as *I* think it should be. You can, after all, listen to all that on the radio, whereas the library probably ought to carry stuff that's less readily accessible. (Of course, here we start to get into the whole ClearChannel every-station's-the-same issue, which is hardly unique to Kansas.) We've got very little in the way of blues, or new-age/eclectic/lifestyle/whatever-they-call-it-
Then again, now that I think about it, maybe your rural Kansas areas *are* pop-music-deficient; I seem to recall picking up nothing but country music when on the road.
It's totally toothless, and actually helps the record companies, imho.
I don't think you'll get any argument from anybody on that one.
The actions of the AG are just the actions of a politician using this as an opportunity to grind his axe and further make a name for himself at the expense of liberty.
Maybe. I think rather he should have said "We're sending them *all* back, and here's a list of guidelines from Kansas libraries. Try again." But that should have happened at settlement time, so...
What smacks of censorship in a big way is that the state attorney general is doing an end run around library sustem policies, dictating what the libraries can and cannot receive, based on his conservative moral standards.
I'd be willing to bet, though, that what got rejected *is* pretty close to what's in library system policies. They're pretty conservative about what they buy, especially in pop music. (Maybe censorship, maybe practicality: limited "staying power," a higher tendency to walk out the door without being checked out, etc.) OTOH, I'm not familiar enough with the accepted/rejected list (as mommy to a preschooler, my listening habits these days tend more toward Wee Sing and VeggieTales) to say for sure there.
And I'd question whether it would be practical or legally possible for individual library systems to do any rejections. They're not the ones who agreed to the settlement, and the record companies could probably say "Oh, Small Town X rejected Album Y? Okay, we'll replace it as soon as you shop it to every other library in the state."
Ford Escort owners often have the same problem.
Bad example, though. Ford Escort owners don't need to have their car stolen; they can just set it on fire. Or rather, just fail to prevent it from setting itself on fire. Problem solved.
It's not "censorship" at all, at least not at that level. They certainly *ought* to reject anything that's not something the library system would have purchased under their current guidelines... these (wait a minute, I should shout this) THESE ARE NOT FREE CDs. These are discs that we ("we" being the CD-buying populace, including library systems) were, in essence, fraudulently charged for, so they darn well be giving us something we *would* pay for.
(Now, if you object overall to a library system's policies on what they purchase, that's a completely different issue.)
Maybe this is very uninformed but it seems to me most players, except some slot-loading ones, could accomodate a 1mm thicker disc without problems at all.
I'll add anecdotal evidence to this. Confusing as heck to pull a disc off a spindle, put it in, and have some other disc start playing, open the drive, confirm it's the disc you thought it was, spend a few moments wondering who's playing a joke on you and how, and then realize that it's two discs with static cling.
If the same article is on multiple sites not giving the MSN site precedence would be plain poor bidness. That's if they really do mean the *same* exact article.
Meanwhile, speaking of Google vs. Microsoft, I just got some mail from a Hotmail user, inquiring about the church budget (which I prepare) for her department. Lots of happy financial keywords, and what's the random(?) ad-sig? "Overwhelmed by debt? Find out how to ~QDig Yourself Out of Debt~R from MSN Money." (~Q and ~R are exactly as seen... Pine apparently doesn't like MS's "smart" quotes.)
So, is that really random, or is MS doing what everyone's coming unglued over Google doing?
I am guessing that you don't cook much because baking and cooking are two different worlds. Baking has a lot of standard recipes and very precise measurements. Cooking is much more free form.
There's still a large amount of room for tinkering in cookie recipes (after all, there's a lot more out there than chocolate chip). Granted you have to keep certain things in balance (more so than in other sorts of cooking), but there's still a great deal of flavor difference between using molasses, brown sugar, or white sugar as your sweetener, just as a for-instance, so I don't think it's that bad of an analogy.
It got the Phoenyx' location right (unsurprisingly, since our IP is right where you'd expect it to be).
But yeah, we're "e-commerce: yes" too, which is fightin' words, as we're a free site, where "free" doesn't mean "call it free then shove ads at you."
We bought a fridge there. White-Westinghouse. No PSP.
Before six months were up, the thing had failed catastrophically twice, and the repair guys (provided by White-Westinghouse under the factory warranty, not Best Buy's) had managed to screw it up worse. We ended up with a fridge that had been "waiting for parts" for longer than it had been keeping our food cold. What was White-Westinghouse's oh-so-generous response? They graciously offered to extend our warranty by adding six months to the end. Be STILL my freakin' HEART!
I ended up calling Best Buy's corporate customer-service line. He gave me a number to call at White-Westinghouse for Best-Buy-specific customer service, and said if that didn't get results, call him back. It didn't get results (I think that's actually when they finally offered to extend the warranty), so I called the guy at Best Buy Back, and said I wanted a new refrigerator, of a different brand. I ended up with a new fridge (a Whirlpool), free pickup/delivery and an icemaker thrown into the bargain. Twelve years later, the Whirlpool is still happily working fine.
Now, that's the appliance end of things, and not the electronics, so I dunno if there's a difference. Only other bad appliance story I have is shopping for a dishwasher, and having a slimy salesman at Montgomery Ward telling me not to go to Best Buy, because they were about to stop selling their large appliances and we'd have trouble getting any warranty work. That was ten years ago, and Best Buy is still selling appliances, and MW's not selling much of anything at all. (We didn't buy the dishwasher there, though, as I recall.)
That said, though, if there'd been any silliness about "rebates" or such, we wouldn't have bought the fridge there in the first place...
Actually, back in the olden days the garage doors *would* open. As I recall, they just waited for a signal (even noise) on a certain frequency. Nowadays they're a little more sophisticated.
My folks had a heck of a time with one opening by itself all the time, and finally had to have Sears come out and fix it, by adjusting the frequency it was expecting to something that was *not* one used by a nearby airport or whatever.
Too bad part 15 of the FCC's guidelines can't apply.
It should, just not in the way you're thinking:
Whatever they had running was so strong, it completely fried the system.
That's what the "must accept interference" part comes in.
Of course, the idea of going to Olds and saying "Your stuff violated part 15 because it didn't accept FCC-legal interference. So replace it with something that does, or I'm siccing the FCC on you!" is probably not terribly workable.
Might be fun, though.
I'm piggy-backing to point out to the below-my-threshold previous poster that there's no reason not to shop thrift stores for computer equipment. Trust me, you *won't* be cheating some poor person out of it... there'll be ten more in the back, and they'll have turned away donations of three dozen more for lack of space. Better you give your cash to the thrift store, which is hopefully also a fundraising servie.
Heck, I've got a whole box of keyboards and mice (Compaqs) that have floated around in the back of my van for a few weeks because I haven't gotten around to taking them to the thrift store. (Leftovers from the church garage sale, donated by a local hospital that was about to fill a Dumpster with P333s rather than pay $800 worth of MS licensing on each of them. We sold all the computers, but most people already had keyboards and mice, and the latter already outnumbered the CPUs.)
Old (and not-so-old; some people dump mice and all when they buy a new computer every two or three years) computer equipment is *not* a scarce commodity.
Now, as to your post directly:
The Microsoft keyboards I have used all have had very soft key action.
That's been my experience. I don't like the Natural, because it's, well, unnatural, but I've also used an MS-branded "conventional" keyboard, and it's definitely one of the weird squishy type.
(Granted that my keyboard preferences may have been skewed at an early age by learning to type on a Color Computer's "chiclet" keyboard...)