I imagine a TSA shift feels pretty long; and fatigue takes its toll.
Sounds like a good reason to be employing people who don't speak the local language. No confusion over misunderstanding the rules or anything, no waste of time or breath being communicative with the punters - just obey the rules or assume The Position.
I just did my first couple of flights for pleasure (as opposed to work) in 15+ years, and I'm not sure which is more insultingly stupid - having to present passports and visas in one direction within the country but not in the opposite direction ; or having one queue at Security taking all shoes off while the adjacent queue didn't bother. Frankly, it's always been easier at work, when everyone has always known that all bags and bodies are going to be searched, breathalysers applied to anyone with even a whiff of drink on them, and any prescription drugs go into the pilot's safe-keeping (with the covering letter from the doctor) for the duration of the flight. At least it's consistent.
Of for the more practical-minded, you've got something to use to grit the sidewalk when it snows.
Errr, the story is from Australia : while it's not quite a continent utterly devoid of snow, it is a very scarce natural commodity. Far more scarce than any other continent with the possible exception of Africa.
There was some preservation of Roman culture preserved by the Eastern Roman Empire, and the church, but a lot of it was torn-apart and used by the invading German tribes as building material.
Can I book my holiday in Gitmo by reminding people that much of what we do know of "classical" (viz : Graeco-Roman) culture was preserved by those evil, evil, Muslims. That's medicine, chemistry (both industrial and theoretical/ alchemical), astronomy, mechanics, much of geography... It's one of the few examples of adherents of a religion actually doing something half-way useful (though I doubt that it was mandated by the religion itself ; more likely it was the political leadership).
Of course that type of experiment is entirely unethical and immoral and we'd have to disregard any result taken from it. Right? Right?!;-)
Wrong. (Is that a smiley indicating that you don't agree with your own position? What a disturbing topic for flippancy.) Every day that I travel to work I don environmental survival clothing to extend the duration of a person downed into cold water. It's a tool, which I've not had to use - yet ; every 2 to 3 years I have to demonstrate my competence at using this and other tools. And every 3 to 5 years we lose a helicopter engine or nearly crash into one of the rigs while we're travelling to work. Swimming home in a mid-winter North Sea is something that makes my arse twitch every time I go to work. Unlike most of my colleagues, I've read the details of where the design work on our survival equipment was started, and what it entailed. It wasn't very good science and wasn't well done; the concentration camp victims (prisoners of religion, politics, sexuality, or conscience) that were killed in the experiments were of very variable degrees of malnutrition and stature, but this was poorly recorded, and their condition monitoring wasn't consistent. But their deaths did found the measurement of exposure. And that is something that I'm thankful for every time I pull that goon suit on over my woolly bear. Equally, I'm thankful for the work that has been done since (largely on poverty-stricken volunteers for various navies around the world) to verify the original work and to understand better how to keep people away from the "nearly dead of hypothermia" limits that the Nazis tried to establish. Just because the experimental protocols used in the original work were repulsive doesn't make the data acquired untouchable ; equally, the utility of data acquired by unethical means shouldn't protect experimenters from punishment or public condemnation.
Now there is something to think about. Maybe the Russians or Chinese have put it to the test?
NASA did it. Twice, if you take slightly differing (practical) meanings of "vacuum". Once in the early 1960s one of their workers suffered a failure of a pressure suit when testing a design change on high-altitude flight suits, becoming exposed to a vacuum chamber in the process. In the late 1960s there was another industrial accident involving a man and a vacuum chamber, and later a 1st person report on the taste of vacuum (it tastes like boiling spit). I don't think space agencies are daring enough in their experimentation : I'd be willing to participate in some such experiments, if I were convinced of the payoff being sufficient (good experimental design making the work useful ; good pay ; if I die, my family continue to receive my full wages until they're dead ; some other Ts & Cs) and the risks suitably low. As a scuba diver, I'm quite attached to, and appreciative of, my lungs ; that doesn't mean not taking calculated risks - I've seen the spinal sections on dead divers that disabuse notions of scuba being harmless. Everything is harmful, starting from oxygen and working to more complex materials.
They can risk 1 million dollars a day in fines from the EU or they can risk 27 million dollars a day by eroding their proprietary lock-in on MS Office.
Or a third (but by no means final) option would be to require all documents submitted to any branch of government to be in a format provably compliant with a (specified) version of ODF. Start with the education systems (11y.o. schoolkid submits coursework in a Wrod.DOC file - the score is zero, the work is unopened, the mark is entered into the record as part of the final course score ; exam companies are told in no uncertain terms to put future exam terminology in ODF terminology ; national curriculum standards require education about the importance of data format endurance and non-propitiatory-ness); move on to the taxation and legal systems over the next year or so. Terrifyingly for MS, in a very short period there would be a whole society growing up with open source file formats, and anyone providing software for any government agency will have to learn how to do it in a non-propitiatory format. The latter is already happening - in my work we've had to start putting in government-compliant files for final delivery to clients.
You know, if you put C4 in a working laptop, I really kinda doubt that the TSA would catch it. Built right, it would just look like a chip or drive on an x-ray.
I don't know the actual competence of the TSA's search people and technologies, but there are certainly technologies out there which give the operator information about both the electron density of the absorbing material in an x-rayed device AND which give information about the composition of the absorbing material. I haven't had to use such technologies myself, but as a for-instance, if you used a fairly broad-spectrum x-ray source and a bolometric detector (one which measures the spectrum of the incident radiation as well as it's location and/ or direction) then you could easily pull out the wavelength(s) at which absorption steps up and correlate that with increases in atomic number. That would give you enough information to pick out organic-rich and/ or nitrogen-rich mixtures and compounds, which covers most readily-available explosives. That's 5 minutes brain-storming about how I'd do it - probably a physics degree and a hours thought would give 5 more techniques to evaluate.
It's ok, i browse through unsecured wifi, using tor routing on a spoofed MAC. no biggie. My neighbor across the street and 5 houses down.. not so much...
You really didn't want to say that. Even assuming that the details are untrue, you've still booked some seriously bad karma from the water-boarding and cattle-prodding of all of the people within range of your stolen connection. [Oh, do you know how they stop the scars from the cattle prods from showing? They put them (the prods, and the scars) where only your proctologist gets to see them.Or you could take you part-way down the "Blood from a Stone" route to parenthood.
In the 1970s, linguist Phil Lieberman, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, inferred the dimensions of the larynx of a Neanderthal based on its skull. His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.'"
There is the old joke that a microgram of data outweighs a megagram of speculation ; so that would make searching for a mummified Neanderthal quite high priority, so that some hard numbers can be put to the profile of the soft tissues in the Neanderthal larynx. I'm quite sure that the archaeologists and anthropologists are doing just that, as much as they can. Unfortunately, most of the known range of the Neanderthals (Western Europe) is climatically unsuitable for classic mummification by dessication. Where the climate is more suitable - Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, maybe extending to Georgia and Azerbaijan - there are political problems with most fieldwork.
Bog bodies might be a way out, but over 30-odd thousand years the climate changes probably mean that nowhere has maintained a suitable bog for the whole period.
I can't think of any other plausible routes for such preservation, unless one gets to do work in the high Arctic.
"It's 2008. I think the idea that educational institutions are anything but commercial meat-grinders has expired."
Honestly, most people have either not figured this out, or are in complete denial about this.
Might I suggest that you watch the (animated) video of "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd. Turn the sound off if you don't like the music, but the imagery of the (animated) video is pretty unambiguous. The lyrics don't leave large amounts of work for your imagination either.
That was about 1980, and I recall it being quite upsetting for my school teachers at the time - they couldn't disagree with it's premise, but to have it put so bluntly and unsubtly was a shock.
Things have gone downhill since then.
(There might be live/stage versions of the song's video too - I don't know and I don't care enough about anyone's music to find out how to find out.)
""I assume that Monster Cable International, Ltd., in Bermuda, listed on these patents, is an IP holding company and that Monster Cable's principal US entity pays licensing fees to the Bermuda corporation in order to shift income out of the United States and thereby avoid paying United States federal income tax on those portions of its income;..." "
Wow...what a great idea!! I'm guessing this is all legal, and I have no problem doing what it takes to keep as much of my money as possible legally.
IANAL, but it's a well-known type of practice.
In my industry, one notorious example was the insistence of a company's head office (in California somewhere IIRC) on specifying the exact equipment in each of the mobile laboratories built by their subsidiaries around the world. Which doesn't sound too unreasonable to someone with an accountancy background instead of a science background. So orders for lab equipment from the States go through without customs interference, and since the final product is going to be leaving the country, the equipment comes in untaxed ("FCG" - Free Circulation Goods - as we had to put on the customs forms when we ordered from our Head Office in Texas). The "lab equipment" included things like an electric kettle billed at $50 which we could have sourced locally for $15.
The name of the game is "repatriation of profit before tax". At least in our business. Boy, was I happy to stop working for American mega-corporations.
The fact is the government is rolling in cash - over $1 TRILLION in foreign reserves (the exact opposite of a national debt) and hold big chunks of US Gov't debt. Probably because of this, there also seems to be no real will among western governments to call them on it, despite increasing industry opposition.
My boss, whose degree is in Geology and Economics, has been going on about this for about 5 years - his take on it is that it's essentially a development from "war is a continuation of diplomacy by other means" : bankrupting your competitors is a continuation of war, by other means. We've got enough concerns about the Chinese, but we've been dealing with them for over 15 years because we're reasonably confident that we'll be better able to survive than our competitors. We're not sure that we (as a company) will be able to survive, but the people we're trying to extinguish are likely to go down first. Which is what matters.
BTW I'm not racist
Whenever I hear that phrase (several times a week), I start searching for the racist. I start by turning in the direction of the person speaking ; it's normally a very short search.
A movie so bad that not even Kate Winslett's tits can save it.
Ah, one of the two highlights of the movie. The other, of course, was Leonardo Di Caprio freezing to death.
I prefer watching Pretty-Boy Pitt getting his face punched to a pulp in Snatch. In slow motion too! Kate Winslet's tits? If I could remember who she was, I might care. Guess I'll just have to forget to watch that film too, the next time the wife gets the DVD.
I thought dropping bombs helped to INCITE people to commit terrorists acts.. not cease them...?
Planning on having a holiday in Guantanamo for the rest of your life?
No? Well you may be in for a bit of a surprise soon. Cease worrying about the black helicopters and start to worry about the police trucks coming up the drive.
Because both vehicles' power can be measure in watts, e.g. a gallon of gas contains around 60 kilowatt-hours of chemical energy.
The challenge that was being addressed wasn't to do with power - it was to do with the total distance that can be travelled. Power is involved, to a small degree, as a certain amount of work has to be done per unit time (i.e. power) to overcome various forces, principally rolling resistance (bearing friction, tyre deformation, etc.) and aerodynamic drag (hence the teardrop shapes. Both of these resistance forces can be decreased to relatively low levels by the simple expedient of travelling more slowly, which reduces the power required from the engine.
That raises an interesting next step in this sort of challenge : getting the maximum fuel efficiency for a set minimum speed. Assuming that you want to have a vehicle that will get you there significantly faster than a pedal bike (otherwise, you'd just use a bike), then a minimum speed of around 30km/hour seems reasonable (Wikipedia suggests 15-25 km/h as typical cycling speeds, which gels with my experience). Checking the rules for the up-coming European version of the event, they say "Minimum speed: For their attempt to be validated, teams shall complete the seven laps at a minimum average speed of 30 km/h." for the prototype phase. There are other indications of pushing towards road-usability in the rules for that phase of the competition : "During each leg, vehicles shall make three pit stops for a duration of 10 seconds each. [snip] During the pit stops, drivers shall use their stop lights and their turn signals."
Invoices. They're snail mail. At least, every one that I've been sent (from non-eBay people, before I got away from them) has been, and the earache I get most months from the girls in the beancounting office talks about "needing to post the invoices to clients by" . How eBay.co.ca handle their communications with business customers may be different. Business-to-business seems to be what so many people are complaining about concerning eBay's fees etc.
DEBIT card details they got - they call it something like verification over here. A debit card (if they exist in Canada) can only be charged to the extent of their balance ; you can't get credit on them.
That would give them the sort-code of a bank (a minor one, who don't get my pay check and whose only purpose in life is to be a disconnect between my real finances and the finances I allow the Internet to see ; the account gets topped up by cash over-the-counter when necessary ), my name, and an account number. They could probably get an address from that, if they tried (I must remember to remove my address from the public electoral roll ; obviously my wife's name isn't on the roll). But I can't recall having received a single snail-mail from eBay, ever. Plenty from sellers, obviously (should be getting a delivery today or tomorrow), but nothing from eBay.co.uk .
I'm also a buyer. But in short, no buyers aren't customers. If you'd like to confirm, check your credit card statement and see how much you pay eBay, then go look at a seller's eBay invoice to understand the difference.
I don't recall ever having received an invoice from eBay when I have sold things. Maybe the system is different in your country. Come to think of it - since eBay don't have a postal address for me, how could they invoice me?
It's almost as though... I was somehow able to learn from history without having to directly experience its lessons, and am able to appreciate the reasons for and benefits of the vaccination programs.
Am I insane?
Yes.
Go back to your school books and find the injunction "the one thing that you learn from history is that people don't learn from history". Now check it - it should be in a bold monospace typeface to indicate that it is an instruction, not a comment or an aphorism.
The saddest thing about the vaccine-dodgers is that more likely than not, it'll be someone else (in whom the vaccine didn't take) who will suffer.
Consequently, an infringement of a US patent has to be found on US soil. Once a case has been found, then the lawyers can ask for (and get) damages that include losses of sales abroad. But without an infringement on US soil, the game doesn't start.
That's what I thought was the case too. Which begs the question of why ANY commercial satellite control groundstations and corporations exist in America.
It also means I've even less than zero to worry about concerning the "drive to the shops to get milk" patent suggested else-thread.
So maybe I will patent driving to the shop to buy milk and you can all either pay me for the license to drive to the shop for milk or download all your drives to the shop for milk from pirate bay.... its ridiculous...
Agreed. It's ridiculous. I walk to the shops to get milk, so you can take your patent and go drive into the lake.
The worst case would be if UMG said, "PReturn our property or else," and I have to waste a dollar on postage returning a piece of junk I never wanted in the first place!
I don't like other people making me lose money.
You label the package you send back to them as being "postage to be paid by recipient".
There have been serious proposals (at least in this country) to require FreePost return addresses to be compulsorily associated with bulk mailing contracts. So, say you as a spammer (sorry, direct marketeer) want to print and distribute a billion slices of spam to people, each in an envelope addressed to "A. Recipient" and an address. You'll also need to negotiate a contract with the postal service so that you can print the postal codes on the envelopes so the letters get through the automated mail-sorting system. (Your alternative is to buy stamps and get licking ; this is much more expensive than buying postage in bulk.) Under the proposed changes, the code that you print on your spams (I mean "letters") will have to include text like "This mail can be returned free of charge to FreePost SpammerCorp", and a post code. You, as SpammerCorp, would then get several tons per day of mail arriving at the FreePost address, and you'd have to pay for it on schedule, otherwise the automated mail sorting machinery would start returning your outgoing mail to your address as "unpaid mail". (You get to pay for that too!)
Sounds lovely? That's why the likes of SpammerCorp have repeatedly tried to squash such proposals from discussion. What else would you expect?
You're not Ebay's customers. The SELLERS are Ebay's customers, and forcing them to use *only* paypal (ebay's service) takes away customer choice, and is an anti-free-market position.
That's the second time you've said that (at least). I take it that you're a seller, not a buyer. I'm (mostly) a buyer. So that makes me a non-customer of eBay?
There's two sides to the question.
From the point of view of many of your customers, the most important thing is to keep things simple. If that cuts into your profit margins, I think your customers could care less. If you don't like it, make someone other than eBay the market leader in online auctioning etc. But you can't do that without your customers.
Is the business that eBay are in an "natural monopoly"? I rather suspect that it is, at least on a nation-by-nation basis. (sideline : someone mentioned in another Slashdot thread a couple of days ago that Romania is practically solely a Yahoo-email country ; I wonder if there are countries that have non-eBay auctioning sites in the dominant position?) Which leads to the conclusion that until millions of users leave them, they're going to do pretty much what they want. For me, as a buyer, the only significant question I've got is - can I use my PayPal sterling account to pay in euros?
Slashdot Mirror
I just did my first couple of flights for pleasure (as opposed to work) in 15+ years, and I'm not sure which is more insultingly stupid - having to present passports and visas in one direction within the country but not in the opposite direction ; or having one queue at Security taking all shoes off while the adjacent queue didn't bother. Frankly, it's always been easier at work, when everyone has always known that all bags and bodies are going to be searched, breathalysers applied to anyone with even a whiff of drink on them, and any prescription drugs go into the pilot's safe-keeping (with the covering letter from the doctor) for the duration of the flight. At least it's consistent.
Can I book my holiday in Gitmo by reminding people that much of what we do know of "classical" (viz : Graeco-Roman) culture was preserved by those evil, evil, Muslims. That's medicine, chemistry (both industrial and theoretical/ alchemical), astronomy, mechanics, much of geography
It's one of the few examples of adherents of a religion actually doing something half-way useful (though I doubt that it was mandated by the religion itself ; more likely it was the political leadership).
Every day that I travel to work I don environmental survival clothing to extend the duration of a person downed into cold water. It's a tool, which I've not had to use - yet ; every 2 to 3 years I have to demonstrate my competence at using this and other tools. And every 3 to 5 years we lose a helicopter engine or nearly crash into one of the rigs while we're travelling to work. Swimming home in a mid-winter North Sea is something that makes my arse twitch every time I go to work.
Unlike most of my colleagues, I've read the details of where the design work on our survival equipment was started, and what it entailed. It wasn't very good science and wasn't well done; the concentration camp victims (prisoners of religion, politics, sexuality, or conscience) that were killed in the experiments were of very variable degrees of malnutrition and stature, but this was poorly recorded, and their condition monitoring wasn't consistent. But their deaths did found the measurement of exposure. And that is something that I'm thankful for every time I pull that goon suit on over my woolly bear. Equally, I'm thankful for the work that has been done since (largely on poverty-stricken volunteers for various navies around the world) to verify the original work and to understand better how to keep people away from the "nearly dead of hypothermia" limits that the Nazis tried to establish.
Just because the experimental protocols used in the original work were repulsive doesn't make the data acquired untouchable ; equally, the utility of data acquired by unethical means shouldn't protect experimenters from punishment or public condemnation.
I don't think space agencies are daring enough in their experimentation : I'd be willing to participate in some such experiments, if I were convinced of the payoff being sufficient (good experimental design making the work useful ; good pay ; if I die, my family continue to receive my full wages until they're dead ; some other Ts & Cs) and the risks suitably low. As a scuba diver, I'm quite attached to, and appreciative of, my lungs ; that doesn't mean not taking calculated risks - I've seen the spinal sections on dead divers that disabuse notions of scuba being harmless. Everything is harmful, starting from oxygen and working to more complex materials.
Terrifyingly for MS, in a very short period there would be a whole society growing up with open source file formats, and anyone providing software for any government agency will have to learn how to do it in a non-propitiatory format.
The latter is already happening - in my work we've had to start putting in government-compliant files for final delivery to clients.
I don't know the actual competence of the TSA's search people and technologies, but there are certainly technologies out there which give the operator information about both the electron density of the absorbing material in an x-rayed device AND which give information about the composition of the absorbing material. I haven't had to use such technologies myself, but as a for-instance, if you used a fairly broad-spectrum x-ray source and a bolometric detector (one which measures the spectrum of the incident radiation as well as it's location and/ or direction) then you could easily pull out the wavelength(s) at which absorption steps up and correlate that with increases in atomic number. That would give you enough information to pick out organic-rich and/ or nitrogen-rich mixtures and compounds, which covers most readily-available explosives.
That's 5 minutes brain-storming about how I'd do it - probably a physics degree and a hours thought would give 5 more techniques to evaluate.
You really didn't want to say that. Even assuming that the details are untrue, you've still booked some seriously bad karma from the water-boarding and cattle-prodding of all of the people within range of your stolen connection. [Oh, do you know how they stop the scars from the cattle prods from showing? They put them (the prods, and the scars) where only your proctologist gets to see them.Or you could take you part-way down the "Blood from a Stone" route to parenthood.
There is the old joke that a microgram of data outweighs a megagram of speculation ; so that would make searching for a mummified Neanderthal quite high priority, so that some hard numbers can be put to the profile of the soft tissues in the Neanderthal larynx. I'm quite sure that the archaeologists and anthropologists are doing just that, as much as they can. Unfortunately, most of the known range of the Neanderthals (Western Europe) is climatically unsuitable for classic mummification by dessication. Where the climate is more suitable - Israel, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, maybe extending to Georgia and Azerbaijan - there are political problems with most fieldwork.
Bog bodies might be a way out, but over 30-odd thousand years the climate changes probably mean that nowhere has maintained a suitable bog for the whole period.
I can't think of any other plausible routes for such preservation, unless one gets to do work in the high Arctic.
That was about 1980, and I recall it being quite upsetting for my school teachers at the time - they couldn't disagree with it's premise, but to have it put so bluntly and unsubtly was a shock.
Things have gone downhill since then.
(There might be live/stage versions of the song's video too - I don't know and I don't care enough about anyone's music to find out how to find out.)
At least, not until the X-ray blast has finished ablating the front 6cm off your face.
IANAL, but it's a well-known type of practice.
In my industry, one notorious example was the insistence of a company's head office (in California somewhere IIRC) on specifying the exact equipment in each of the mobile laboratories built by their subsidiaries around the world. Which doesn't sound too unreasonable to someone with an accountancy background instead of a science background. So orders for lab equipment from the States go through without customs interference, and since the final product is going to be leaving the country, the equipment comes in untaxed ("FCG" - Free Circulation Goods - as we had to put on the customs forms when we ordered from our Head Office in Texas). The "lab equipment" included things like an electric kettle billed at $50 which we could have sourced locally for $15.
The name of the game is "repatriation of profit before tax". At least in our business. Boy, was I happy to stop working for American mega-corporations.
My boss, whose degree is in Geology and Economics, has been going on about this for about 5 years - his take on it is that it's essentially a development from "war is a continuation of diplomacy by other means" : bankrupting your competitors is a continuation of war, by other means. We've got enough concerns about the Chinese, but we've been dealing with them for over 15 years because we're reasonably confident that we'll be better able to survive than our competitors. We're not sure that we (as a company) will be able to survive, but the people we're trying to extinguish are likely to go down first. Which is what matters. Whenever I hear that phrase (several times a week), I start searching for the racist. I start by turning in the direction of the person speaking ; it's normally a very short search.
I prefer watching Pretty-Boy Pitt getting his face punched to a pulp in Snatch. In slow motion too!
Kate Winslet's tits? If I could remember who she was, I might care.
Guess I'll just have to forget to watch that film too, the next time the wife gets the DVD.
No? Well you may be in for a bit of a surprise soon. Cease worrying about the black helicopters and start to worry about the police trucks coming up the drive.
Been nice knowing you.
The challenge that was being addressed wasn't to do with power - it was to do with the total distance that can be travelled. Power is involved, to a small degree, as a certain amount of work has to be done per unit time (i.e. power) to overcome various forces, principally rolling resistance (bearing friction, tyre deformation, etc.) and aerodynamic drag (hence the teardrop shapes. Both of these resistance forces can be decreased to relatively low levels by the simple expedient of travelling more slowly, which reduces the power required from the engine.
That raises an interesting next step in this sort of challenge : getting the maximum fuel efficiency for a set minimum speed. Assuming that you want to have a vehicle that will get you there significantly faster than a pedal bike (otherwise, you'd just use a bike), then a minimum speed of around 30km/hour seems reasonable (Wikipedia suggests 15-25 km/h as typical cycling speeds, which gels with my experience). Checking the rules for the up-coming European version of the event, they say "Minimum speed: For their attempt to be validated, teams shall complete the seven laps at a minimum average speed of 30 km/h." for the prototype phase. There are other indications of pushing towards road-usability in the rules for that phase of the competition : "During each leg, vehicles shall make three pit stops for a duration of 10 seconds each. [snip] During the pit stops, drivers shall use their stop lights and their turn signals."
Invoices. They're snail mail. At least, every one that I've been sent (from non-eBay people, before I got away from them) has been, and the earache I get most months from the girls in the beancounting office talks about "needing to post the invoices to clients by" . How eBay.co.ca handle their communications with business customers may be different. Business-to-business seems to be what so many people are complaining about concerning eBay's fees etc.
That would give them the sort-code of a bank (a minor one, who don't get my pay check and whose only purpose in life is to be a disconnect between my real finances and the finances I allow the Internet to see ; the account gets topped up by cash over-the-counter when necessary ), my name, and an account number. They could probably get an address from that, if they tried (I must remember to remove my address from the public electoral roll ; obviously my wife's name isn't on the roll). But I can't recall having received a single snail-mail from eBay, ever. Plenty from sellers, obviously (should be getting a delivery today or tomorrow), but nothing from eBay.co.uk .
I don't recall ever having received an invoice from eBay when I have sold things. Maybe the system is different in your country. Come to think of it - since eBay don't have a postal address for me, how could they invoice me?
Yes.
Go back to your school books and find the injunction "the one thing that you learn from history is that people don't learn from history". Now check it - it should be in a bold monospace typeface to indicate that it is an instruction , not a comment or an aphorism.
The saddest thing about the vaccine-dodgers is that more likely than not, it'll be someone else (in whom the vaccine didn't take) who will suffer.
That's what I thought was the case too. Which begs the question of why ANY commercial satellite control groundstations and corporations exist in America.
It also means I've even less than zero to worry about concerning the "drive to the shops to get milk" patent suggested else-thread.
Agreed. It's ridiculous. I walk to the shops to get milk, so you can take your patent and go drive into the lake.
You label the package you send back to them as being "postage to be paid by recipient".
There have been serious proposals (at least in this country) to require FreePost return addresses to be compulsorily associated with bulk mailing contracts. So, say you as a spammer (sorry, direct marketeer) want to print and distribute a billion slices of spam to people, each in an envelope addressed to "A. Recipient" and an address. You'll also need to negotiate a contract with the postal service so that you can print the postal codes on the envelopes so the letters get through the automated mail-sorting system. (Your alternative is to buy stamps and get licking ; this is much more expensive than buying postage in bulk.) Under the proposed changes, the code that you print on your spams (I mean "letters") will have to include text like "This mail can be returned free of charge to FreePost SpammerCorp", and a post code. You, as SpammerCorp, would then get several tons per day of mail arriving at the FreePost address, and you'd have to pay for it on schedule, otherwise the automated mail sorting machinery would start returning your outgoing mail to your address as "unpaid mail". (You get to pay for that too!)
Sounds lovely? That's why the likes of SpammerCorp have repeatedly tried to squash such proposals from discussion. What else would you expect?
That's the second time you've said that (at least). I take it that you're a seller, not a buyer. I'm (mostly) a buyer. So that makes me a non-customer of eBay?
There's two sides to the question.
From the point of view of many of your customers, the most important thing is to keep things simple. If that cuts into your profit margins, I think your customers could care less. If you don't like it, make someone other than eBay the market leader in online auctioning etc. But you can't do that without your customers.
Is the business that eBay are in an "natural monopoly"? I rather suspect that it is, at least on a nation-by-nation basis. (sideline : someone mentioned in another Slashdot thread a couple of days ago that Romania is practically solely a Yahoo-email country ; I wonder if there are countries that have non-eBay auctioning sites in the dominant position?) Which leads to the conclusion that until millions of users leave them, they're going to do pretty much what they want. For me, as a buyer, the only significant question I've got is - can I use my PayPal sterling account to pay in euros?