By making it next to impossible to actually walk out of the store having purchaced only that item (using various sales tactics).
What do you call "next to impossible?" Can you actually give an example of such a thing happening, or are you just making stuff up? I've bought lots of stuff on sale from Best Buy and similar electronics stores, and I can't ever remember being told "you can't buy that without buying ___," or "You can't buy that, you have to buy ___ instead."
The last time I ever bought anything from Best Buy it was an internal modem. The package was in shrink wrap, and
not identified as open box...
Are you under the impression that this anecdote, while reflecting badly on the store, has anything to do with my comment, which specifically was about the original poster's statement that Best Buy is marking things as "open box" when they shouldn't?
The reason why nobody knows what's in it is because they don't read it. If you actually read what you're agreeing to, it's generally not all that complicated. In fact, they usually say very clearly that the warranty does not cover accidents or abuse. I hardly want the courts to tell me that I'm not allowed to enter into an agreement with somebody else in order to protect people who are too stupid to read what they sign. I stand by my statement that he has no excuse for not reading the agreement.
They push the limits of the laws with many of their flyer ads with some cheap product, like a 40 dollar DVD player to get you in the store, in hopes of encouraging you to buy something better, ie more expensive.
How is this "pushing the limits of the laws?" Getting you into the store is the whole point of having a sale, regardless of the store.
Open box items are usually returned items, not something that just happened to get opened in store, which rarely happens.
This really isn't a big secret. That's what "open box" means; that the box has been opened, probably by a previous buyer. Most everyone knows that.
Besides those, most of the rest of your complaints are that salesmen are expected to try to sell stuff. Big deal. I may not particularly like being on the receiving end of it, but I recognize that's what they're there for (and getting paid to do). If I wanted to avoid them, I'd just tell them to leave me alone, or go elsewhere.
Apparently the fellow had bought a video camera, damaged it in a fashion not covered under warranty (apparently dropped it over the side of a boat into a lake or something, I can't remember exactly now) and then got upset when Best Buy refused to honor the service plan.
It's worth noting that salesmen in these electronics stores often claim that their service plans cover anything that happens to the items, and so it's not too surprising that people get mad when they refuse to fix damaged items. It doesn't excuse the guy in question from reading the fine print before blowing his money on one of these worthless "service plans," but it does make the situation a little more understandable.
It'll keep track of your sleep cycle, gently bringing up the room lights at precisely the right time so that you'll feel rested, not cardiac arrested, as you awake.
Right, like your boss is going to let you waltz in at 10:30 because your brain-wave monitor didn't deem you rested until after 9. (And if you've had enough rest, don't you wake up naturally? Why use a device to do it for you?)
Today, your coffee can be brewed while you sleep; tomorrow's robokitchen will have an entire hot (but low carb!) breakfast waiting for you.
Robotic houses have had the same history of being "right around the corner" as artifical intelligence and fusion power. And does he really think the Atkins diet fad is going to last a whole decade?
Your spouse and kids will be taken care of, too -- with smart toilets analyzing their urine and sensor-rich toothbrushes checking their saliva to make sure everything is ticketyboo; most health problems will be caught early and be trivial to correct.
Seems a bit overengineered to me. We might have the technology to pull it off, but I can't see it being put to wide use within a decade. However, I would not be surprised if slightly less "futuristic" health monitoring techniques become common practice: for instance, maybe kids at school will have a weekly finger-prick test for common diseases.
Throughout the day, your wristband -- a combination cellphone, PDA, camera, and e-book display, all controlled by spoken commands -- will be your lifeline.
I wonder why it is that whenever SF authors try to think up high-tech communication devices, they always go for the wristband idea. And yet, although they make watches with practically anything you want built-in, they don't catch on. (For a variety of reasons, although I think the main one is size. He wants to read an e-book on his watch?! The fact that the watches with built-in address books and calculators aren't aesthetically pleasing doesn't help any.) If anything, it seems much more likely to me that that we'll end up with an improved cell phone/PDA style device than a new watch.
You'll have just one phone number, good worldwide with no long-distance or roaming charges,...
Ha!
Anyway, I'm not trying to beat this guy's ideas to death. After all, if these predictions of the future that show up all the time have taught us anything, it's that we have absolutely no clue what the future is going to be like. But it's still fun to guess.
Last time I looked, Blender's renderer, while decent, couldn't hold a candle to raytracers; it was mainly good for previewing. However, that was back before the whole open source blender thing, so it may be improved.
Unfortunately, Yafray has some of the weirdest compilation requirements I've ever seen. And glancing at their page, it looks like they've gotten even worse than last time I looked -- now you not only need a particular point release of g++, you also need some weird build tool called scons. And you have to compile Blender from scratch, too. When I tried to get the thing working a few months ago, I finally gave up in disgust. Maybe someday when I can install it easily, I'll give it a shot, but for now I'll just stick with pov-ray.
What kind of idiot would design a whitelist that only works on a per-domain level? Nobody's going to whitelist "*@hotmail.com", that's just stupid. In fact, you wouldn't even want to whitelist your contacts; it's far better to only whitelist mailing lists.
And every time, we have to remind you that whitelists are easily occupied by zombied machines, especially for the big email providers like Hotmail, AOL, Earthlink, big universities, etc.
Uh... do you even know what a whitelist is? Having a zombie machine doesn't do a spammer any good at all; one person isn't likely to be in the whitelist of more than a few dozen people.
So spammers spam each other (or themselves from a different host) and have an endless supply of RPOW tokens. No problems solved.
Unless spammers are selling to each other, this wouldn't help them any. Think of it like conservation of energy. Calculating a POW is like generating energy. Spamming someone requires energy. Spamming yourself just moves energy from one place to another. In the end, you still need to calculate the same number of POWs to spam a set of people.
That costs actual real world money, and continues to cost in power usage.
So does spam. If this was cheaper than the cost of dealing with spam, companies would do it in a heartbeat.
That paper makes a couple glaring errors that significantly reduce my confidence in their results. The first is that it ignores whitelist systems that allow mailing lists to continue to function without needing to pay the price that spammers do: instead, they analyze only the trivial case where every email that is sent has a fixed cost to send. The second is that they assume that such a system has to be guaranteed to eliminate spam, while simply reducing it would be acceptable.
The last sentence of their conclusion is "We leave analysis of such schemes to futurework - fully expecting to be able to debunk some further proposals by the simpleapplication of real-world measurements and values." It's obvious that the authors have something of an axe to grind on this issue -- and so it's not surprising that their reasoning is somewhat flawed.
Does that mean that legitimate mailing-lists servers will have to wait 2 seconds for each e-mails they send?
This comes up every single time that someone talks about technical means of stopping spam. And every time, we have to remind you that whitelists can solve the problem trivially. (In this case, you have a system where the receiver [you] accept mail without proof of work from mailing lists.)
Windows 0wned machines computing hashes like a cluster...
Right now, cracked boxes are used for sending spam. If you slow down the rate that it's possible to send spam by 1000, then you get a thousandfold decrease in spam.
Please don't say the s-word. Although I agree with the sentiment, anytime somebody says the word steal, we get an offtopic flamewar over the word as every karma whore within range of a keyboard reposts the same "ITS NOT STEALING!!!111!!1" post, and anything worthwhile to be said gets lost in the confusion. As the moderators aren't smart enough to help sweep them under the rug, it's preferable to just avoid starting it.
I'm not asserting that "he" is currently "wrong" according to grammatical "standards", but rather that I choose to change my usage in order to (I hope) change the standards.
OK, I can agree with that. I was taking issue with your statement that using "he" means that you assume the person being referred to is male -- which is not the case.
"He" has been correct merely by the weight of tradition, and traditions are made to be broken.
See, the thing is -- you have a misunderstanding of what grammar is. It's all tradition. Every single grammatical rule comes from one source -- that people do it that way. Yes, language can change -- but it hasn't yet, and using "he" is still proper in formal writing.
And you're still incorrect in stating that using the pronoun "he" is mis-stating someone's gender. I already addressed that in my last post; please read it again until you understand it.
Always assume male. This was common and correct practice in bygone days, but I don't think it's reasonable nowadays.
You've got this one wrong. The point of using "he" is not that you are assuming that the person is male. Rather, "he" is the correct pronoun to use in a situation where the pronoun could refer to a person of either sex. In formal writing, it's still generally the best choice.
Now come on, that's not really a valid reason to send people to jail is it?
Er -- yes, it is. Are you really prepared to say that nobody should ever go to jail for vandalism, arson, theft, embezzlement, or any other crime that results in loss of money or time?
And you're misinterpreting the meaning of the research you're referring to. (I've studied some of it before; that article is rather misleading.) Yes, an 18-year-old kid does not think in exactly the same way as an adult. That does not mean that he can't think about consequences, and it certainly does not mean that he bears no responsibility for his actions.
The difference between his playing around and your playing around is that what he did cost people lots of time and money. You're trying to just gloss over that, but the fact of the matter is that it makes a whole world of difference. An 18-year-old person is an adult: he is expected to think about the consequences of his actions, and is expected to take responsibility for what he does. He should be required to do everything possible to make restitution for those harmed by his actions. (Of course, those harmed by him probably won't see much -- if any -- of the money, but that's another can of worms, and doesn't excuse him from his responsibilities.)
How about comparing his "playing around with tech" to somebody "playing around with matches" who purposefully burns down a building? What's the difference? In fact, he probably got off with a lighter sentence for doing more actual damage than a lot of criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
And you know, if only one person out of ten thousand actually cares, perhaps we deserve the RIAA.
Besides those, most of the rest of your complaints are that salesmen are expected to try to sell stuff. Big deal. I may not particularly like being on the receiving end of it, but I recognize that's what they're there for (and getting paid to do). If I wanted to avoid them, I'd just tell them to leave me alone, or go elsewhere.
Anyway, I'm not trying to beat this guy's ideas to death. After all, if these predictions of the future that show up all the time have taught us anything, it's that we have absolutely no clue what the future is going to be like. But it's still fun to guess.
Unfortunately, Yafray has some of the weirdest compilation requirements I've ever seen. And glancing at their page, it looks like they've gotten even worse than last time I looked -- now you not only need a particular point release of g++, you also need some weird build tool called scons. And you have to compile Blender from scratch, too. When I tried to get the thing working a few months ago, I finally gave up in disgust. Maybe someday when I can install it easily, I'll give it a shot, but for now I'll just stick with pov-ray.
Yeah, cause we all know that right-wingers are the only ones with a vested interest in copyright controls.
The last sentence of their conclusion is "We leave analysis of such schemes to futurework - fully expecting to be able to debunk some further proposals by the simpleapplication of real-world measurements and values." It's obvious that the authors have something of an axe to grind on this issue -- and so it's not surprising that their reasoning is somewhat flawed.
Would it kill you to turn it off? You'd be helping to Save the Planet, too.
The solution is to use solar-powered Hummers, of course.
Because michael's an idiot?
And you're still incorrect in stating that using the pronoun "he" is mis-stating someone's gender. I already addressed that in my last post; please read it again until you understand it.
Ah, come on. If they didn't post these articles every day or two, nobody would ever get their karma up to "Excellent."
And you're misinterpreting the meaning of the research you're referring to. (I've studied some of it before; that article is rather misleading.) Yes, an 18-year-old kid does not think in exactly the same way as an adult. That does not mean that he can't think about consequences, and it certainly does not mean that he bears no responsibility for his actions.
How about comparing his "playing around with tech" to somebody "playing around with matches" who purposefully burns down a building? What's the difference? In fact, he probably got off with a lighter sentence for doing more actual damage than a lot of criminals.