I never expected that eBay could be such a huge hassle from the seller's side - especially dealing with the people who apparently can't read. As a buyer the experience is more or less perfect, at least, for me.
I've had very little trouble buying, aside from the odd occasion when something explicitly marked as coming from a UK source ended up coming from China instead (so taking a week or three to arrive, not a couple of days). There have always been too many stupid or otherwise irritating buyers for my tastes when I've sold stuff by that route though and the problem seemed to become much worse, coincidentally, when eBay stopped sellers being able to leave negative feedback for buyers...
Another irritation from the sellers side, if you are selling to make profit rather than just to get rid of stuff by means other than land-fill, is the ever increasing charges taken from the final value and being pretty much forced to use PayPal (and so incur more charges that go to eBay's coffers).
My problem with putting old kit on eBay is the fact that you get pennies for your time (taking pictures, describing the item, answering questions asked by fuckwits, dealing with people who decide not to pay in the end, packaging the item up and posting it - I'd rather spend that time and effort with my friends or the cat). If you list an item for personal collection only (to save time and effort on packaging and posting) people at the other end of the country still bid either because they think you will make an exception for them or because they saw a bargain and didn't bother to check the details before bidding. My old laser printer was list three times with "personal collection only" in the paid-for sub-title, in the delivery terms, and repeatedly in the descriptive text and it was only on the third attempt that the winning bidder was someone who did not expect me to post the item to them. So fuck that, too much hassle.
I could put the items on frecycle, but people on there get on my nerves too. "Please tell me what times you can collect" I *always* added to posts, and people would either not bother giving such information or would say "any time". Guaranteed, what-ever time I suggested most people would then say "I can't come then, could you do such-and-such time instead". And then there is the lying fuckwits. The obviously fake sob stories really get on my nerves, especially as I always put on my postings "priority will be given to people who just tell me they want the item and when they can collect, you have less chance of getting the item if you say anything more than that". I once put an old-but-decent TV on freecycle - you would not believe how many people's house-bound grandmothers coincidentally had their TV stop working that very weekend (I literally got some version of that story from a few tens of people). Not that I care who got the TV, I only put it there as none of my friends/family needed it and I needed it out of the way and I'd prefer it didn't go to land-fill, but the dishonesty just got on my nerves. The final straw was that the local freecycle groups uses Yahoo! Groups which I couldn't stand at the best of times but I cancelled all my Yahoo related accounts after one of their little "if you don't cancel your account we'll assume you agree to our new lack-of-privacy policy" events.
Most of the old kit I have I've kept for silly nostalgia purposes - certainly the really old kit like the Voodoo card (in that box I think there are parts enough to make a working machine, sans case, of the era). Instead of eBay or freecycle or their ilk I now offer things (old and not so old) that I no longer want to friends and family (and people I stay in contact with out of a desire not to be impolite and/or not to cause arguments between others) via a facebook post. If no one wants what-ever it is I take it to the local recycling centre / dump. There is one guy, who I'm in contact with only to keep an eye on the creep, who takes most of the stuff with possible cash value that noone else claims first, including a large amount of stuff from when I had a mass clear-out of the flat. I'm told he thinks he is in some way being clever and ripping me off as he has done the eBay thing with most of it (and has asked everyone else not to tell me he does that) which I find rather amusing as he is actually doing me a favour by turning up and dealing with my junk for me!
Fair point. Though one thing that is well documented, by this video if nothing else, is that Officer Bubbles is a dick, at at least acted like a macho dick on that particular occasion. While she may have caused some meaningful aggravation during the cut in the video that wouldn't excuse Offer Dick Bubbles for being a dick before that point.
Agreed. Facebook won't give up invading users' privacy until they get replaced by a site that cares about user privacy.
And such a site would not survive without eventually pulling the same tricks or charging their users somehow. I'm guessing the server resources needed to run facebook are not small. Something distributed like Diaspora might work but only if everyone runs their own server (so they are not trusting a service who may sell the data anyway) and installs security updates promptly (otherwise Joe Bloggs will get exploited and immediately all his info and anything the accounts on his server has access to).
And I can guarantee that that caring attitude will last precisely long enough to bury Facebook as a competitor before they start doing exactly the same thing.
Exactly. Either that or the users will have to pay, and that'll never happen.
Users just have to accept they can have privacy or Facebook, but not both.
Or you could just make sure facebook doesn't have any data that you care about them selling. They can have my occasional rant about what is in the news, they can have the pictures of my cat, they can have my faked personal details and the few genuine bits of information (which amounts to part of my name, the people I'm connected to and the few things I've clicked "like" on).
If you don't put anything on there that you don't want made public, all is well. Unless of course you consider the data about you that can be mined from your contacts postings of course...
You could argue that the students win because the school will not do anything like that again in a hurry, and that students in general win because other schools will be more careful not to blatantly infringe upon their personal space too. Not everything comes down to just money - the deterrent of there now being a successful action in recorded case law may well have some value.
Admittedly some of that value is to the lawyers as they can use it too, as it is them that will be paid to interpret the outcome as being in favour of their clients in future cases. And as it is a school that has been hit with the judgement, and it isn't a fully privately funded institution, the money actually comes from the "winners" and the rest of the state's tax payers in the end...
Doesn't Best Buy become that original owner if they take it out of the box and accept legal agreements?
Possibly, or some similarly inconvenient part of the relevant agreements would cause confusion. This is probably how Sony would put a stop to such services should they wish to, but unless the service is harming sales or the products reputation (which could be as little as people thinking it is more expensive from all sources, not just from BB) there is little reason for Sony to care.
It isn't cultural, at least not specific to Chinese culture if you are talking about the people. Many over their are poor, many more are very poor. Copying an idea, making it more cheaply (or just cutting off some of the margins) and making money off it, if you can get away with it, is a potential way out of the poverty trap. If Americans or Europeans could get away with it they would, and some try. The reason the problem is so rife in China is that the size of the rich/poor divide (locally within China and when comparing most of their populous to other parts of the world) means there are many more there if nothing to lose by trying. Admittedly the legal system in China doesn't help by making it very difficult to chase a case over there if you are not Chinese, but the relative difficulty or tracing those responsible probably hinders more than that and this is not unique to China. Corruption within the system has an effect to, but again that is not specific to China (large parts of India and Africa have/pose similar problems, or so the stories I've heard would suggest).
They weren't willing to compromise, even at the cost of losing the sale. They lost the sale.
Their business model is dying because they can not compete directly with online retailers (who don't have shop rents and other expenses from physical points of sale to pay for) without making a bit extra somewhere. They can't simply get away with just inflating the prices anymore because even the lower end of the general public is getting smart to the idea of buying online if there is a saving (or if the price is exactly the same but the retail outlets are some drive away so getting items delivered is more convenient). So shops like BestBuy are trying to be seen to add value in the eyes of the consumer in order to inflate the prices above those offered by businesses with lower cost bases without the customer walking away.
Margins on these things are very very small these days because of this competition - so they'd rather no have the the few $ from you at the expense of the opportunity cost of getting $30+few from the next guy. Presumably this makes sense to them on average even though they lost a sale in your case. Also in the case you describe, when there are no inflated versions of the product available, they had the choice of giving you the "extra" free (they wouldn't want to set that precedent), doing some work to remove the extra (more time cost to them) or saying "sorry, none in stock, but we do have this version".
Physical retail establishments for low/medium-price consumer items is a dying business model, only physical stores that offer specialist goods/services (such as personal customisation or local based tech support), that sell something you would generally want to physically see before paying for, or that sell perishables that you'd prefer not get delayed in the post, or that sell items that still command a high mark-up (non-mass-produced fashion items and so forth) will survive (and even some of them look shaky outside the short term) and BestBuy and their ilk are trying to push themselves into one of those categories before it is too late. I don't think it is going to work, but they aren't going to die without trying.
thats a great idea! until other retailers....
start doing the same thing
customers stop asking questions and just pay for it.
But that could be stopped by...
1. A competing console manufacturer not allowing retailers to do this (by tehnical measures or the underhand pressure they've been known to use to make retailers move their way in the past)
2. Said competitor makes a "thing" of relative pricing
3. Sony also force the retailers to stop, as they don't want to be the one that looks more expensive because of the BestBuy tax
provides you with a perfectly functional Bash shell
There-in lies a problem. While I'd be perfectly happy to consider using Git there is no way I could recommend it in my workplace until such time as there are good "tools from noddies" like TortoiseSVN and VisualSVN. We don't really need a full DVCS, so we are not really Git's target audience, I'd guess there are many companies out there that could take advantage of a DVCS that won't consider Git for similar reasons.
I said nothing about what-ever-the-hypothetical-something-is making money from its visitors. And you wouldn't have to make it unusable to anyone - just enough slower or laggy that people might notice the difference between their connection and a friends.
I was working on the basis that I wouldn't care so much about being part of the market (the imaginary scenario when I have time to put something worth-while together that people might want to use is dependent on another imaginary scenario: the one where I win millions on the lottery).
Even then: an ISPs customers are not like the public in China. An ISPs customer can move to another ISP if their current one become inconvenient (though in this scenario I'll admit that even in my imaginary case this is highly unlikely - many sites/apps/services would need to be thusly angered into action to have any effect) but the people of China can't just up sticks and move to a country they might find more convenient.
NoScript is an absolute must have for anyone who knows what they are doing
Actually, users who know what they are doing don't need NoScript, we just don't visit shitty sites in the first place, but hey, whatever makes you feel superior to... well whoever you think NoScript makes you better than.
You obviously don't have friends who are less careful and send you links to iffy sites in amongst links to ones you are actually interested in. You've obviously never visited an otherwise legitimate and safe site who was using an advertising network that either went bad of their own accord or were somehow exploited by a malicious entity. And so on. While it certainly isn't for everyone, NoScript is something I find particularly useful. White-listing the sites you need to run code from is easy and once you've been using it for a short while all your regular trusted sites are trusted by default and cause you no hassle.
Two can play at that game. If I ever create something popular enough to require quite a bit of bandwidth (unlikely, I know, but it might happen...), I know which ISPs will get more "traffic shape"ed than others (i.e. this pair and Virgin whose top dick made similar statements a couple of years ago).
"although he added BT had never received such an approach."
Maybe the few companies interested in doing so though they would be told to get lost and didn't want to risk having their name found out for making the request if they got nothing out of said request. I can't be the only one who sees this statement from the ISPs as an invitation for providers to start making offers for priority over their competitors.
This would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
... which is most of the time. There are very few ISPs who do not have a significantly over-subscribed backbone at peak times (BT and TalkTalk both being quite bad at times according to people I know who have used them recently) and some are even over-subscribe at most times (all but the middle of the night).
Imagine if you will that you chip your kid, and they will not divulge their whereabouts because they ran away and do not want to be contacted by you!
Depending on why the kid ran away this might be a perfectly valid situation. Imagine you had a chip in you, ran away from an abusive family, and the chip company just handed over your location against your wishes (or the wishes of your new legal guardian).
That isn't relevant anyway. As many people have said already they are *not* refusing to tell him where the dog is (they don't know) they are refusing to tell him where the people who have re-registered (or have tried to re-register) the dog's ownership. They are not even refusing because of their own policy, they are refusing because it would not be legal for them to act on the request. If they gave him what he asked for they would be breaking the law and that law, while far from perfect, exists for good reason. The DPA does have provisions allowing it to be bypassed in situations like this, but he has to follow the correct procedure which unfortunately involves officially reporting the dog as stolen property.
Having scanned the article it would appear that he has officially reported the dog stolen, but the police have decided (wrongly in my opinion, though I am not in full possession of all the facts at this point) there isn't a case to answer so he will have to persue other legal avenues if he want to proceed. Yes this is bad, but it does not mean that the DPA is bad or that, as your post seems to be suggesting, the company is bad for obeying said law. Perhaps the police are wrong in their interpretaion and there is a case to answer (my opinion is leaning that way) but there is nothing the company can do about that - the (original) owner will need to consult a qualified legal adviser at this point to find out what he an do to proceed.
One of the things that put me off mySQL some years ago was people both within the wider community and within the project team themselves seeming to claim that if you wanted such things you were doing things wrong. Not "we don't support that (yet)" but "you're being stupid" and if pressed the best you could raise them to was "here's a workaround that will achieve more-or-less the same thing with a chunk of extra work".
I may be about to be told I'm being wrong headed (and perhaps petty) here as no doubt the entire development team has changed several times over the years, but I can't quite shake the thought that maybe those features were implemented just to shut people up rather than because the team actually understood their importance to those asking for them. If I need/want those properties, other things being equal, I'd rather use a database that has had those properties baked in for much longer.
The idea behind the commercial is that the cats would naturally seek out the most comfortable furniture.
As anyone who is responsible for cats knows, what we consider comfortable is a much smaller set than the set of objects that a cat can get comfortable on.
Very much depends on what you want that would make one better over the others. I use NameCheap for most things these days, having used GoDaddy in the past. I took one domain with NC to take advantage of some special offer (I remember not what, it was some time ago) and found their interface to be a *lot* less spammy though that was not enough to make me want to bother switching my other existing domains. I came close to switching as the GoDaddy interface became progressively more irritating and finally switched over something small (again I remember not what, was it them who were allegedly paid to switch their domain holding servers to IIS to game the netcraft survey and similar stats? or it could just have been the increasingly immature impression the companies advertising gave off that I wanted to step away from).
Anyway. NC have done nothing to irritate me in the few years I've been using them, and the free SSL cert is sometimes worth having if they still have that offer on, but many registrars are pretty much the same where it really counts (you have a domain, your DNS reliably resolves) so shop around rather than taking my current preference as meaningful.
If you call the apparent transfer of state information between entangled partials (so one if affected by interactions with the other) the information leaping between the two, then a quantum leap could be quite some distance.
Slashdot Mirror
I never expected that eBay could be such a huge hassle from the seller's side - especially dealing with the people who apparently can't read. As a buyer the experience is more or less perfect, at least, for me.
I've had very little trouble buying, aside from the odd occasion when something explicitly marked as coming from a UK source ended up coming from China instead (so taking a week or three to arrive, not a couple of days). There have always been too many stupid or otherwise irritating buyers for my tastes when I've sold stuff by that route though and the problem seemed to become much worse, coincidentally, when eBay stopped sellers being able to leave negative feedback for buyers...
Another irritation from the sellers side, if you are selling to make profit rather than just to get rid of stuff by means other than land-fill, is the ever increasing charges taken from the final value and being pretty much forced to use PayPal (and so incur more charges that go to eBay's coffers).
My problem with putting old kit on eBay is the fact that you get pennies for your time (taking pictures, describing the item, answering questions asked by fuckwits, dealing with people who decide not to pay in the end, packaging the item up and posting it - I'd rather spend that time and effort with my friends or the cat). If you list an item for personal collection only (to save time and effort on packaging and posting) people at the other end of the country still bid either because they think you will make an exception for them or because they saw a bargain and didn't bother to check the details before bidding. My old laser printer was list three times with "personal collection only" in the paid-for sub-title, in the delivery terms, and repeatedly in the descriptive text and it was only on the third attempt that the winning bidder was someone who did not expect me to post the item to them. So fuck that, too much hassle.
I could put the items on frecycle, but people on there get on my nerves too. "Please tell me what times you can collect" I *always* added to posts, and people would either not bother giving such information or would say "any time". Guaranteed, what-ever time I suggested most people would then say "I can't come then, could you do such-and-such time instead". And then there is the lying fuckwits. The obviously fake sob stories really get on my nerves, especially as I always put on my postings "priority will be given to people who just tell me they want the item and when they can collect, you have less chance of getting the item if you say anything more than that". I once put an old-but-decent TV on freecycle - you would not believe how many people's house-bound grandmothers coincidentally had their TV stop working that very weekend (I literally got some version of that story from a few tens of people). Not that I care who got the TV, I only put it there as none of my friends/family needed it and I needed it out of the way and I'd prefer it didn't go to land-fill, but the dishonesty just got on my nerves. The final straw was that the local freecycle groups uses Yahoo! Groups which I couldn't stand at the best of times but I cancelled all my Yahoo related accounts after one of their little "if you don't cancel your account we'll assume you agree to our new lack-of-privacy policy" events.
Most of the old kit I have I've kept for silly nostalgia purposes - certainly the really old kit like the Voodoo card (in that box I think there are parts enough to make a working machine, sans case, of the era). Instead of eBay or freecycle or their ilk I now offer things (old and not so old) that I no longer want to friends and family (and people I stay in contact with out of a desire not to be impolite and/or not to cause arguments between others) via a facebook post. If no one wants what-ever it is I take it to the local recycling centre / dump. There is one guy, who I'm in contact with only to keep an eye on the creep, who takes most of the stuff with possible cash value that noone else claims first, including a large amount of stuff from when I had a mass clear-out of the flat. I'm told he thinks he is in some way being clever and ripping me off as he has done the eBay thing with most of it (and has asked everyone else not to tell me he does that) which I find rather amusing as he is actually doing me a favour by turning up and dealing with my junk for me!
Fair point. Though one thing that is well documented, by this video if nothing else, is that Officer Bubbles is a dick, at at least acted like a macho dick on that particular occasion. While she may have caused some meaningful aggravation during the cut in the video that wouldn't excuse Offer Dick Bubbles for being a dick before that point.
Agreed. Facebook won't give up invading users' privacy until they get replaced by a site that cares about user privacy.
And such a site would not survive without eventually pulling the same tricks or charging their users somehow. I'm guessing the server resources needed to run facebook are not small. Something distributed like Diaspora might work but only if everyone runs their own server (so they are not trusting a service who may sell the data anyway) and installs security updates promptly (otherwise Joe Bloggs will get exploited and immediately all his info and anything the accounts on his server has access to).
And I can guarantee that that caring attitude will last precisely long enough to bury Facebook as a competitor before they start doing exactly the same thing.
Exactly. Either that or the users will have to pay, and that'll never happen.
Users just have to accept they can have privacy or Facebook, but not both.
Or you could just make sure facebook doesn't have any data that you care about them selling. They can have my occasional rant about what is in the news, they can have the pictures of my cat, they can have my faked personal details and the few genuine bits of information (which amounts to part of my name, the people I'm connected to and the few things I've clicked "like" on).
If you don't put anything on there that you don't want made public, all is well. Unless of course you consider the data about you that can be mined from your contacts postings of course...
My box-o-junk-I'll-never-use-again still has a original Voodoo board in it. And some 32-ping SIMMs for the AWE32 sound card I no longer own...
You could argue that the students win because the school will not do anything like that again in a hurry, and that students in general win because other schools will be more careful not to blatantly infringe upon their personal space too. Not everything comes down to just money - the deterrent of there now being a successful action in recorded case law may well have some value.
Admittedly some of that value is to the lawyers as they can use it too, as it is them that will be paid to interpret the outcome as being in favour of their clients in future cases. And as it is a school that has been hit with the judgement, and it isn't a fully privately funded institution, the money actually comes from the "winners" and the rest of the state's tax payers in the end...
Doesn't Best Buy become that original owner if they take it out of the box and accept legal agreements?
Possibly, or some similarly inconvenient part of the relevant agreements would cause confusion. This is probably how Sony would put a stop to such services should they wish to, but unless the service is harming sales or the products reputation (which could be as little as people thinking it is more expensive from all sources, not just from BB) there is little reason for Sony to care.
It isn't cultural, at least not specific to Chinese culture if you are talking about the people. Many over their are poor, many more are very poor. Copying an idea, making it more cheaply (or just cutting off some of the margins) and making money off it, if you can get away with it, is a potential way out of the poverty trap. If Americans or Europeans could get away with it they would, and some try. The reason the problem is so rife in China is that the size of the rich/poor divide (locally within China and when comparing most of their populous to other parts of the world) means there are many more there if nothing to lose by trying. Admittedly the legal system in China doesn't help by making it very difficult to chase a case over there if you are not Chinese, but the relative difficulty or tracing those responsible probably hinders more than that and this is not unique to China. Corruption within the system has an effect to, but again that is not specific to China (large parts of India and Africa have/pose similar problems, or so the stories I've heard would suggest).
They weren't willing to compromise, even at the cost of losing the sale. They lost the sale.
Their business model is dying because they can not compete directly with online retailers (who don't have shop rents and other expenses from physical points of sale to pay for) without making a bit extra somewhere. They can't simply get away with just inflating the prices anymore because even the lower end of the general public is getting smart to the idea of buying online if there is a saving (or if the price is exactly the same but the retail outlets are some drive away so getting items delivered is more convenient). So shops like BestBuy are trying to be seen to add value in the eyes of the consumer in order to inflate the prices above those offered by businesses with lower cost bases without the customer walking away.
Margins on these things are very very small these days because of this competition - so they'd rather no have the the few $ from you at the expense of the opportunity cost of getting $30+few from the next guy. Presumably this makes sense to them on average even though they lost a sale in your case. Also in the case you describe, when there are no inflated versions of the product available, they had the choice of giving you the "extra" free (they wouldn't want to set that precedent), doing some work to remove the extra (more time cost to them) or saying "sorry, none in stock, but we do have this version".
Physical retail establishments for low/medium-price consumer items is a dying business model, only physical stores that offer specialist goods/services (such as personal customisation or local based tech support), that sell something you would generally want to physically see before paying for, or that sell perishables that you'd prefer not get delayed in the post, or that sell items that still command a high mark-up (non-mass-produced fashion items and so forth) will survive (and even some of them look shaky outside the short term) and BestBuy and their ilk are trying to push themselves into one of those categories before it is too late. I don't think it is going to work, but they aren't going to die without trying.
thats a great idea! until other retailers.... start doing the same thing customers stop asking questions and just pay for it.
But that could be stopped by...
1. A competing console manufacturer not allowing retailers to do this (by tehnical measures or the underhand pressure they've been known to use to make retailers move their way in the past)
2. Said competitor makes a "thing" of relative pricing
3. Sony also force the retailers to stop, as they don't want to be the one that looks more expensive because of the BestBuy tax
provides you with a perfectly functional Bash shell
There-in lies a problem. While I'd be perfectly happy to consider using Git there is no way I could recommend it in my workplace until such time as there are good "tools from noddies" like TortoiseSVN and VisualSVN. We don't really need a full DVCS, so we are not really Git's target audience, I'd guess there are many companies out there that could take advantage of a DVCS that won't consider Git for similar reasons.
I said nothing about what-ever-the-hypothetical-something-is making money from its visitors. And you wouldn't have to make it unusable to anyone - just enough slower or laggy that people might notice the difference between their connection and a friends.
I was working on the basis that I wouldn't care so much about being part of the market (the imaginary scenario when I have time to put something worth-while together that people might want to use is dependent on another imaginary scenario: the one where I win millions on the lottery).
Even then: an ISPs customers are not like the public in China. An ISPs customer can move to another ISP if their current one become inconvenient (though in this scenario I'll admit that even in my imaginary case this is highly unlikely - many sites/apps/services would need to be thusly angered into action to have any effect) but the people of China can't just up sticks and move to a country they might find more convenient.
Actually, users who know what they are doing don't need NoScript, we just don't visit shitty sites in the first place, but hey, whatever makes you feel superior to ... well whoever you think NoScript makes you better than.
You obviously don't have friends who are less careful and send you links to iffy sites in amongst links to ones you are actually interested in. You've obviously never visited an otherwise legitimate and safe site who was using an advertising network that either went bad of their own accord or were somehow exploited by a malicious entity. And so on. While it certainly isn't for everyone, NoScript is something I find particularly useful. White-listing the sites you need to run code from is easy and once you've been using it for a short while all your regular trusted sites are trusted by default and cause you no hassle.
"although he added BT had never received such an approach."
Maybe the few companies interested in doing so though they would be told to get lost and didn't want to risk having their name found out for making the request if they got nothing out of said request. I can't be the only one who sees this statement from the ISPs as an invitation for providers to start making offers for priority over their competitors.
This would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
... which is most of the time. There are very few ISPs who do not have a significantly over-subscribed backbone at peak times (BT and TalkTalk both being quite bad at times according to people I know who have used them recently) and some are even over-subscribe at most times (all but the middle of the night).
Imagine if you will that you chip your kid, and they will not divulge their whereabouts because they ran away and do not want to be contacted by you!
Depending on why the kid ran away this might be a perfectly valid situation. Imagine you had a chip in you, ran away from an abusive family, and the chip company just handed over your location against your wishes (or the wishes of your new legal guardian).
That isn't relevant anyway. As many people have said already they are *not* refusing to tell him where the dog is (they don't know) they are refusing to tell him where the people who have re-registered (or have tried to re-register) the dog's ownership. They are not even refusing because of their own policy, they are refusing because it would not be legal for them to act on the request. If they gave him what he asked for they would be breaking the law and that law, while far from perfect, exists for good reason. The DPA does have provisions allowing it to be bypassed in situations like this, but he has to follow the correct procedure which unfortunately involves officially reporting the dog as stolen property.
Having scanned the article it would appear that he has officially reported the dog stolen, but the police have decided (wrongly in my opinion, though I am not in full possession of all the facts at this point) there isn't a case to answer so he will have to persue other legal avenues if he want to proceed. Yes this is bad, but it does not mean that the DPA is bad or that, as your post seems to be suggesting, the company is bad for obeying said law. Perhaps the police are wrong in their interpretaion and there is a case to answer (my opinion is leaning that way) but there is nothing the company can do about that - the (original) owner will need to consult a qualified legal adviser at this point to find out what he an do to proceed.
no foreign keys! no transaactions! no ACID!
One of the things that put me off mySQL some years ago was people both within the wider community and within the project team themselves seeming to claim that if you wanted such things you were doing things wrong. Not "we don't support that (yet)" but "you're being stupid" and if pressed the best you could raise them to was "here's a workaround that will achieve more-or-less the same thing with a chunk of extra work".
I may be about to be told I'm being wrong headed (and perhaps petty) here as no doubt the entire development team has changed several times over the years, but I can't quite shake the thought that maybe those features were implemented just to shut people up rather than because the team actually understood their importance to those asking for them. If I need/want those properties, other things being equal, I'd rather use a database that has had those properties baked in for much longer.
Nah, the most comfortable (or most interesting) spot on the planet is the book you are currently trying to read.
The idea behind the commercial is that the cats would naturally seek out the most comfortable furniture.
As anyone who is responsible for cats knows, what we consider comfortable is a much smaller set than the set of objects that a cat can get comfortable on.
Does anyone know a better alternative registrar?
Very much depends on what you want that would make one better over the others. I use NameCheap for most things these days, having used GoDaddy in the past. I took one domain with NC to take advantage of some special offer (I remember not what, it was some time ago) and found their interface to be a *lot* less spammy though that was not enough to make me want to bother switching my other existing domains. I came close to switching as the GoDaddy interface became progressively more irritating and finally switched over something small (again I remember not what, was it them who were allegedly paid to switch their domain holding servers to IIS to game the netcraft survey and similar stats? or it could just have been the increasingly immature impression the companies advertising gave off that I wanted to step away from).
Anyway. NC have done nothing to irritate me in the few years I've been using them, and the free SSL cert is sometimes worth having if they still have that offer on, but many registrars are pretty much the same where it really counts (you have a domain, your DNS reliably resolves) so shop around rather than taking my current preference as meaningful.
There goes my pension plan: looks like I can't drink myself to the point where I won't live long enough to need a pension...
Every time you use Powerpoint Edward Tufte kills a kitten: http://markandrewgoetz.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/my-new-wallpaper/
If you call the apparent transfer of state information between entangled partials (so one if affected by interactions with the other) the information leaping between the two, then a quantum leap could be quite some distance.
And if they add that, I'd like a "meh" button too.