Oh come on. It's not as if I can't get the same thing in a million other places. And if a store bans someone for actually getting their money back by force for a store's wrongly refusing a return (there have been lawsuits over this), they're just asking for a horrid reputation and very bad press in newspapers and on television. That will lose them sales and send customers to competitors who don't treat the customer like dirt just for exercising their right to override staff stupidity. Companies know that further cheating someone who has been cheated once already is one of the worst things they can do for their reputation. (You gave Best Buy as an example; I already refuse to shop there due to their bad practices and I tell others not to shop there too).
I've had places I've never even heard of help themselves to my credit card before (and yes, I changed the account number) and not only did I do a chargeback but I also gave out their names very blatantly and multiple people I know will never shop there. And my bank took the money back. If they want to whine at me, they shouldn't have cheated me, huh? And I feel no remorse for grinding them even farther into the ground if they don't learn their lesson from having been punished once.
If the store refuses to take the goods back, in violation of most EULAs, your credit card company will yank the money out of their merchant account and hit them with a punitive chargeback fee on top of that. Sure, you have to attempt to return the goods first, but once you have, the bank will take an attitude toward the store of too-bad-so-sad.
Credit cards are very useful for protecting yourself against dishonest merchants. And I consider this sort of thing to be very dishonest.
That wasn't the point of the Grand Challenge, though. The GC was designed to help develop autonomous vehicles for things like long-distance supply missions. Your friend's complaint is like complaining that a digital SLR camera can't record movies even though it's good at what it was designed for -- still image capture. It can't capture movies because its design makes that physically impossible since it wasn't meant for movie capture. Similarly, the GC robots weren't designed for clearing minefields and no one ever said they would be useful for that.
I have a lot of computer junk in my basement that I have not gotten rid of due to this problem. I feel that it's better for it to gather dust in my basement (and on my front porch; I have an old tower case I put there that I need to move) than it is for it to leech gunk out of a landfill somewhere.
I went to http://www.computertakeback.com/ and clicked on Missouri and was not given a list of recyclers to go to but instead given bullshit about how great their pledge for recyclers is. That's great and all, but aren't you supposed to be telling me where to dispose of my e-waste? You aren't doing that, c'mon!
So where do I take it? I have an old Mac and miscellaneous other computer parts I don't need. I have an entire system that I will be retiring soon and replacing with a Shuttle-type box or an Intel Mac tower when those are released (though I may re-use a few of the components and put the hard drives in external Firewire enclosures).
I also am hard of hearing and have a large number of used hearing-aid batteries that need to be disposed of. Where can I take my large stash of used batteries for safe disposal? They are not fit to be thrown into a landfill. This is going to be an ongoing need for the rest of my life as I can't see self-powered hearing aids being introduced any time soon!
Money can't erase a bad upbringing. There's a reason for the saying that money can't buy happiness. You can get a lot of money from someone and still resent them.
Oh, so now it's brainless to say that I can and will report criminal harassment to the police and that I'm a self-righteous bitch for standing up for myself and refusing to be intimidated?
What color is your sky? Mauve?
Bend over and be screwed if you wish. But don't imply that I'm stupid for standing up for myself. Sounds awfully self-righteous of you to think that everyone else will bend so quickly, like you.
The embed tag may not be W3C standardized but it is the accepted way to add Flash objects and so forth to websites. I don't give a damn what reason MS has for breaking compatibility -- I'm not going to go out of my way to fix my work just for them, especially since they can't be bothered to follow W3C standards as it is already. They can keep digging their grave deeper for all I care. If you can't realize that yes, it is a Microsoft problem, your loss.
So that means every page with any usage of plugins will be broken.
No. The pages are not broken. They are properly coded. The browser is broken, and I will not be changing my properly-coded pages to accomodate for Microsoft yet again setting up their software to behave differently than every other browser out there. If anyone complains, my answer will be "use a non-broken browser; they're free and multiplatform. My site properly conforms to standards. If you don't want to download a new browser, just click the button, and remember that it's Microsoft's fault".
I never said that he's doing anything illegal. I did say that this is horribly lousy parenting, as part of good parenting is letting your kids make their own choices without your interference (unless someone would be harmed by something your kids did) and letting them learn from their own mistakes. If they talk to their friends and their friends recommend doing something, and daddy says no because the wrong logo is on the item, what kind of lesson is that? I wouldn't want my kids, when I have them, to learn that a shallow choice based on a pretty logo means a lot more than well-thought-out-and-researched choices do. And that's not letting your kids make their own choices -- it's imposing your own misguided ideals on other people, and that (while it may be within the law) is immoral.
And he would track you down how? Phone harassment is a crime. It should be prosecuted as such and not tolerated. And it may be true that only recently have you been able to get caller ID at home but the phone company has long been able to track who called you -- and under a criminal complaint they would be obliged to help the police prosecute. Especially with evidence of drugs being involved.
No iPods or Google? Might as well tattoo kick me signs on their backs.
It's worse. You don't parent by meddling in kids' lives to the point where you loom over them and not only say "You have to be home by 10pm, and you can't use the car" but then to also say "You can use the web to search but you can't search the way all your friends do" and "You can listen to music but you can't listen to it with what all your friends use"... what is going to happen to these kids? They're going to be resentful of their father's repeated interference in their lives just becaise he doesn't like the brand of the devices they want to use. Kids have to learn to be responsible on their own and make their own informed choices, and a parent who interferes with their choices based on what you have to admit is an arbitrary criterion when it comes down to it is just going to find that his kids have no respect for him.
When I was a kid my parents let me make my own choices. If I wanted to use brand X instead of brand Y that they preferred, it was my choice. They expected me to do my own research, and to make choices that were good for me and didn't get me in trouble, or anyone else in trouble. They had their preferences, sure, but if I wanted to buy item X with my weekly allowance, they let me buy it.
A good parent does that. This isn't good parenting. It's not teaching the responsibility of making one's own choices, it's teaching that you should accept at face value that if someone else says that something is bad, it's bad, and to hell with the 99 people on one side of the room who say that you're making the wrong choice if Daddy gets it into his head that he, who is just one person, thinks he's right.
My father never did that, and it got him respect. This is just going to get an attitude of "Damn parents meddling in my life". And so the circle of "my parents are idiots" continues, and therefore so does the circle of kids who are ever-ruder and have less and less respect for their parents by the day -- no, by the minute.
I think that in many places, small claims court requires you to represent yourself. Also given that small claims court is aimed at individuals to be able to make claims rather than being oriented toward huge cases being fought by teams of lawyers like many "regular" cases are, it might not be as bad as you think.
I wonder, did you refuse to pay the charges? I would have demanded that the phone company cancel them, and sued in court if they refused as consent was never given.
Once I answered the phone, got the usual idiot. I said, "Asshole!" and hung up. He speed-dialed me until I got tired of hanging up on him, then left a 20-minute rant on my answering machine.
I would have run his number, then called his local police department and filed a harassment complaint, then phoned him and left a message on HIS machine that informed him that the police were now involved and that you did not appreciate being harassed when you got tired of being harassed in the first place.
So if you're on a $10/month texting plan you can find someone you don't like, send him as many messages as you can, and he racks up a huge bill?
We also have this thing called small claims court in which you sue to recover the money you paid and also demand punitive damages on top of that, and if you don't pay up when a court orders you to, there's a world of trouble awaiting you.
Or one could always have their number blocked. Or one could always use a plan (as I do) where you don't get charged per message.
This actualy is even more stupid than the Creditcard principle where you can also easily lose money without actualy wanting to spend it. Use PIN! PIN! Just as easy, it works like a bank withdrawel, it is free, it is more secure, and disables other peoples ability to pretend that you (intended to) pay them, as with creditcard is perfectly doable..
Stupid Americans
So let me get this straight. I'm stupid for taking advantage of a federal law that limits my liability to $50 if anyone scams me and charges things to my account, and stupid for not using the card linked to my actual bank account that, if anyone gets ahold of it, actually results in money being drained from my actual account? No thank you, and furthermore, I think you need to do some research into why these days identity theft is more than enough reason to not use a debit card.
You'll sing a different tune when your checking account gets drained and you can't just wait for your bank to issue a chargeback, cancel the fraudulent charges, and hit the scamming companies with a fee in addition to yanking the money back out of their merchant account.
So my bank hires phishers to try to get me to hand over my account info? So Pfizer hires spammers to sell its medications without a prescription? So Microsoft and Adobe and Symantec hire spammers to sell OEM bundle-only CDs?
Bad move? So you acted to protect the majority of your users and two people complained so that makes it a bad move? If it's only two people out of 300 users that complained about it, you helped 298 people. Those that actually do want the emails can be exempted from the filter if they request it, but filtering spam by default is what I'd expect from my mailserver, and it's up to me to act if I actually want to receive mail that is perfectly legitimately normally caught by spam filters.
They will be enforced. Why? Because legitimate ISPs are easy to find and sue, but spammers aren't. The idea of suing spammers, and not doing anything further, was idiotic in the first place. We need to keep the laws that make spamming a crime -- AND stop allowing ISPs to pretend it's not their problem.
It's a lot easier to enforce regulations barring ISPs from willingly ignoring spam than it is to find the assholes who are dumping crap into my mailbox every day. You tell me why my bank keeps wanting to give me $20 multiple times a day and who is sending those messages, and cram a wrapped bundle of 20s up his/her ass and send me proof (not a photo, please!) and then I'll believe that this law is stupid.
It would be stupid if enforcement was actually going on. The thing is, there are spammers being busted and I'm still being spammed, so the existing laws that you suggest using are not doing any good. Those are the laws that are stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on. It's not as if I can't get the same thing in a million other places. And if a store bans someone for actually getting their money back by force for a store's wrongly refusing a return (there have been lawsuits over this), they're just asking for a horrid reputation and very bad press in newspapers and on television. That will lose them sales and send customers to competitors who don't treat the customer like dirt just for exercising their right to override staff stupidity. Companies know that further cheating someone who has been cheated once already is one of the worst things they can do for their reputation. (You gave Best Buy as an example; I already refuse to shop there due to their bad practices and I tell others not to shop there too).
I've had places I've never even heard of help themselves to my credit card before (and yes, I changed the account number) and not only did I do a chargeback but I also gave out their names very blatantly and multiple people I know will never shop there. And my bank took the money back. If they want to whine at me, they shouldn't have cheated me, huh? And I feel no remorse for grinding them even farther into the ground if they don't learn their lesson from having been punished once.
Yes, you can get your money back.
You paid with a credit card, didn't you?
If the store refuses to take the goods back, in violation of most EULAs, your credit card company will yank the money out of their merchant account and hit them with a punitive chargeback fee on top of that. Sure, you have to attempt to return the goods first, but once you have, the bank will take an attitude toward the store of too-bad-so-sad.
Credit cards are very useful for protecting yourself against dishonest merchants. And I consider this sort of thing to be very dishonest.
They can tell it to my credit card company's chargeback and associated chargeback fee.
That wasn't the point of the Grand Challenge, though. The GC was designed to help develop autonomous vehicles for things like long-distance supply missions. Your friend's complaint is like complaining that a digital SLR camera can't record movies even though it's good at what it was designed for -- still image capture. It can't capture movies because its design makes that physically impossible since it wasn't meant for movie capture. Similarly, the GC robots weren't designed for clearing minefields and no one ever said they would be useful for that.
Apples and oranges.
I have a lot of computer junk in my basement that I have not gotten rid of due to this problem. I feel that it's better for it to gather dust in my basement (and on my front porch; I have an old tower case I put there that I need to move) than it is for it to leech gunk out of a landfill somewhere.
I went to http://www.computertakeback.com/ and clicked on Missouri and was not given a list of recyclers to go to but instead given bullshit about how great their pledge for recyclers is. That's great and all, but aren't you supposed to be telling me where to dispose of my e-waste? You aren't doing that, c'mon!
So where do I take it? I have an old Mac and miscellaneous other computer parts I don't need. I have an entire system that I will be retiring soon and replacing with a Shuttle-type box or an Intel Mac tower when those are released (though I may re-use a few of the components and put the hard drives in external Firewire enclosures).
I also am hard of hearing and have a large number of used hearing-aid batteries that need to be disposed of. Where can I take my large stash of used batteries for safe disposal? They are not fit to be thrown into a landfill. This is going to be an ongoing need for the rest of my life as I can't see self-powered hearing aids being introduced any time soon!
Apple will take them back at any of its stores, according to http://www.computertakeback.com./
Helping, yes. But not outright arbitrarily brainwashing them and saying "you can't make this choice because of this stupid arbitrary reason".
Money can't erase a bad upbringing. There's a reason for the saying that money can't buy happiness. You can get a lot of money from someone and still resent them.
Oh, so now it's brainless to say that I can and will report criminal harassment to the police and that I'm a self-righteous bitch for standing up for myself and refusing to be intimidated?
What color is your sky? Mauve?
Bend over and be screwed if you wish. But don't imply that I'm stupid for standing up for myself. Sounds awfully self-righteous of you to think that everyone else will bend so quickly, like you.
The embed tag may not be W3C standardized but it is the accepted way to add Flash objects and so forth to websites. I don't give a damn what reason MS has for breaking compatibility -- I'm not going to go out of my way to fix my work just for them, especially since they can't be bothered to follow W3C standards as it is already. They can keep digging their grave deeper for all I care. If you can't realize that yes, it is a Microsoft problem, your loss.
And the developer will say, "That will be $bigmoney to fix Microsoft's screwups. How will you be paying?"
So that means every page with any usage of plugins will be broken.
No. The pages are not broken. They are properly coded. The browser is broken, and I will not be changing my properly-coded pages to accomodate for Microsoft yet again setting up their software to behave differently than every other browser out there. If anyone complains, my answer will be "use a non-broken browser; they're free and multiplatform. My site properly conforms to standards. If you don't want to download a new browser, just click the button, and remember that it's Microsoft's fault".
I never said that he's doing anything illegal. I did say that this is horribly lousy parenting, as part of good parenting is letting your kids make their own choices without your interference (unless someone would be harmed by something your kids did) and letting them learn from their own mistakes. If they talk to their friends and their friends recommend doing something, and daddy says no because the wrong logo is on the item, what kind of lesson is that? I wouldn't want my kids, when I have them, to learn that a shallow choice based on a pretty logo means a lot more than well-thought-out-and-researched choices do. And that's not letting your kids make their own choices -- it's imposing your own misguided ideals on other people, and that (while it may be within the law) is immoral.
And he would track you down how? Phone harassment is a crime. It should be prosecuted as such and not tolerated. And it may be true that only recently have you been able to get caller ID at home but the phone company has long been able to track who called you -- and under a criminal complaint they would be obliged to help the police prosecute. Especially with evidence of drugs being involved.
No iPods or Google? Might as well tattoo kick me signs on their backs.
... what is going to happen to these kids? They're going to be resentful of their father's repeated interference in their lives just becaise he doesn't like the brand of the devices they want to use. Kids have to learn to be responsible on their own and make their own informed choices, and a parent who interferes with their choices based on what you have to admit is an arbitrary criterion when it comes down to it is just going to find that his kids have no respect for him.
It's worse. You don't parent by meddling in kids' lives to the point where you loom over them and not only say "You have to be home by 10pm, and you can't use the car" but then to also say "You can use the web to search but you can't search the way all your friends do" and "You can listen to music but you can't listen to it with what all your friends use"
When I was a kid my parents let me make my own choices. If I wanted to use brand X instead of brand Y that they preferred, it was my choice. They expected me to do my own research, and to make choices that were good for me and didn't get me in trouble, or anyone else in trouble. They had their preferences, sure, but if I wanted to buy item X with my weekly allowance, they let me buy it.
A good parent does that. This isn't good parenting. It's not teaching the responsibility of making one's own choices, it's teaching that you should accept at face value that if someone else says that something is bad, it's bad, and to hell with the 99 people on one side of the room who say that you're making the wrong choice if Daddy gets it into his head that he, who is just one person, thinks he's right.
My father never did that, and it got him respect. This is just going to get an attitude of "Damn parents meddling in my life". And so the circle of "my parents are idiots" continues, and therefore so does the circle of kids who are ever-ruder and have less and less respect for their parents by the day -- no, by the minute.
As in, hopefully, a nasty fine! A simple prank call is one thing but that guy went way beyond that.
I think that in many places, small claims court requires you to represent yourself. Also given that small claims court is aimed at individuals to be able to make claims rather than being oriented toward huge cases being fought by teams of lawyers like many "regular" cases are, it might not be as bad as you think.
The aviation geek in me likes your sig, too.
I wonder, did you refuse to pay the charges? I would have demanded that the phone company cancel them, and sued in court if they refused as consent was never given.
Once I answered the phone, got the usual idiot. I said, "Asshole!" and hung up. He speed-dialed me until I got tired of hanging up on him, then left a 20-minute rant on my answering machine.
I would have run his number, then called his local police department and filed a harassment complaint, then phoned him and left a message on HIS machine that informed him that the police were now involved and that you did not appreciate being harassed when you got tired of being harassed in the first place.
So if you're on a $10/month texting plan you can find someone you don't like, send him as many messages as you can, and he racks up a huge bill?
We also have this thing called small claims court in which you sue to recover the money you paid and also demand punitive damages on top of that, and if you don't pay up when a court orders you to, there's a world of trouble awaiting you.
Or one could always have their number blocked. Or one could always use a plan (as I do) where you don't get charged per message.
This actualy is even more stupid than the Creditcard principle where you can also easily lose money without actualy wanting to spend it. Use PIN! PIN! Just as easy, it works like a bank withdrawel, it is free, it is more secure,
and disables other peoples ability to pretend that you (intended to) pay them, as with creditcard is perfectly doable..
Stupid Americans
So let me get this straight. I'm stupid for taking advantage of a federal law that limits my liability to $50 if anyone scams me and charges things to my account, and stupid for not using the card linked to my actual bank account that, if anyone gets ahold of it, actually results in money being drained from my actual account? No thank you, and furthermore, I think you need to do some research into why these days identity theft is more than enough reason to not use a debit card.
You'll sing a different tune when your checking account gets drained and you can't just wait for your bank to issue a chargeback, cancel the fraudulent charges, and hit the scamming companies with a fee in addition to yanking the money back out of their merchant account.
So my bank hires phishers to try to get me to hand over my account info? So Pfizer hires spammers to sell its medications without a prescription? So Microsoft and Adobe and Symantec hire spammers to sell OEM bundle-only CDs?
The hell spammers are easy to find.
Bad move? So you acted to protect the majority of your users and two people complained so that makes it a bad move? If it's only two people out of 300 users that complained about it, you helped 298 people. Those that actually do want the emails can be exempted from the filter if they request it, but filtering spam by default is what I'd expect from my mailserver, and it's up to me to act if I actually want to receive mail that is perfectly legitimately normally caught by spam filters.
GOOD MOVE.
They will be enforced. Why? Because legitimate ISPs are easy to find and sue, but spammers aren't. The idea of suing spammers, and not doing anything further, was idiotic in the first place. We need to keep the laws that make spamming a crime -- AND stop allowing ISPs to pretend it's not their problem.
It's a lot easier to enforce regulations barring ISPs from willingly ignoring spam than it is to find the assholes who are dumping crap into my mailbox every day. You tell me why my bank keeps wanting to give me $20 multiple times a day and who is sending those messages, and cram a wrapped bundle of 20s up his/her ass and send me proof (not a photo, please!) and then I'll believe that this law is stupid.
It would be stupid if enforcement was actually going on. The thing is, there are spammers being busted and I'm still being spammed, so the existing laws that you suggest using are not doing any good. Those are the laws that are stupid.