* The 10-day cooling off period takes effect. This applies only to goods or services worth $50 or more that are not delivered at the time of sale or paid in full at the time of purchase.
Stage two - August 3, 2001
* The cooling off period will be extended to apply to all sales made at the consumer's home, whether the goods are delivered or services are provided at the time of sale or afterwards, and regardless of whether payment is made in full or in part.
* The only exception to the cooling off period is in a case of emergency home repairs, and then the consumer must have approached the seller and have requested the services to be provided within 10 days of receiving the written contract.
* Consumers may cancel any direct sales contract if goods are not received or services not provided within 30 days of the date promised.
* All direct sales contracts must include:
o a description of the item and price
o delivery dates and charges
o start and completion dates, and
o the buyer and seller's name and address.
but only in situations where it would present the only way to move data out of the company without getting caught.
Most companies have wide open internet connections, and it's trivial to just upload stuff elsewhere. OR email it.
OR stick it on a CDR/DVDR
Or stick it on a bigass portable firewire hard drive.
If you are in a sensitive, secure environment, where all the above are disabled and/or forbidden.. and you work in isolation, then of COURSE you don't allow your staff to pack in an iPod.
THere is this attitude, especially in the US/Canada, that the customer is ALWAYS correct, and that large stores are moneybags just to be exploited.
A store that offers rebates that cause them to lose money takes a risk. THat's a fact, finding ways to mitigate that risk is a good idea. Offering more sane deals is a better one.
Some customers ARE a pain in the ass, and not worth dealing with. Buying things to claim rebates and return the item afterwards for a full refund is , if not illegal, dishonest, and morally wrong. THe store didn't even have ot take it back in the first place, let alone give you a rebate.
Well.. if the return policy does not require to you to return the rebate cupons un-filled out.. then there is nothing wrong with an employee suggesting this.
The problem is a broken return policy.
HEck.. the problem is a return policy at all!
A business is under no obligation legally to take back a returned item once sold, as long as it is not defective and was not sold under false pretenses. Businesses like BestBuy take returns in the first place as a courtesy to customers, because it's something people expect from large stores.
So you feel a business should not have the right to treat better customers better?
Whether you like it or not, a bank is a business, and those who the banks make more money off get better service.. that's BUSINESS.
IF I walk into my bank, past you, and go into a side office where I deal with my personal banker, while you wait in line, do you feel that you have been done an injustice?
What if I walk into the grocery store, where I buy supplies for my restaurant on occasion, and the owner opens up a register on a busy day JUST to deal with me, so I can get in and out of there quickly? DO you feel you have been done an injustice?
If you don't like the customer service you are offered, you are free to spend your money elsewhere.
YES, the packages are out of date. I'm talking about STABLE>
The fact that I can use UNSTABLE which has more or less modern packages in it, but might fuck up on any given day when doing an upate means i lose the benefit of using debian in the first place, and it's totally unsuitable for production use on lots of servers.
Sure, if you have one workstation, or one pet server, it's acceptable, easily. If you want a few dozen scattered around the globe, it's not.
"Oh yeah the NEW BETA version has those new features" is a microsoft like excuse...what you are saying comes awfully close to that.
Yes, I understand exactly what unstable means in this context.
You are right; I don't want things to go out of whack just like that.... major revisions of things, especially things like postgres, etc, should not change within one version, requiring reformat of databses, etc. what I *do* want is a STABLE release sooner than every 2 years, with more modern packages that aren't 2 YEARS out of date by the time the next version of debian makes it stable.
I don't want to have to use backports and experimental packages just to use packages that are already a year old and in production *everywhere*.
IN other words, if debian just lessened the scope of what is required to be integrated and stable, got it down to a more realistic set of packages, it would be fine.
What we need is for the core packages to be much smaller, and not change often.
Give us a core around which everything else is built that can be relied upon.. and that is up to date.
I should not have to wait for a thousand other packages, many of them very complex, and not necessarily popular, to perfectly integrate before I can use a newer version of apace or postgresql.
Unstable does NOT mean it will crash, not at all.. unstable means the layout and dependencies are not stable, and prone to change from update to update.
I cannot afford to run an update and have dependencies break partway through.
As a workstation, I would not hesitate to run unstable, not at all.. as such quirks can be easily dealt with.
Yes, I can test on another machine.... but that can be difficult in practice.. a certian level of stability of updates is needed.
Fixing things by hand is very difficult..
Yes i am perfectly capable of building from source, or using another package format... or using backports from somewhere else for updated packages.. but that defeats a large part of hte purpose for running debian.
They are so far out of whack with reality, what's another year? who cares?
What they NEED to do is strip down the core distribution and produce major updates faster.
That debian is still widely used despite being in the stone age is a testimony to all the things they are doing right.. now they just NEED to get releases under control.
I was at a friends, he had is 520-ST partially disassembled (enclosure unscrewed).
I was peeking inside, with it off, lifting out the keyboard, which is attached to the mainboard, more or less. I set this down, by accident near the back of the machine, where the exposed AC power supply was.
One quick snap and a flash, and that was a dead ST.
Steve: I still owe you an ST, and I haven't forgotten.
Not every country works just like the USA. In many countries money talks, that's all. Internet in many places is prohibitively expensive in the first place as far as the local average population is concerned, and may even require bribes to obtain (becuase it's only available for certain reasons, like school, etc, so you have to convince some official that your business is "education" related, etc.)
In these countries, those running the service, which may even be a government monopoly, don't give a crap what goes on with it so long as the money comes in. They answer to nobody, except perhaps a government that equally doesn't give a crap, they have more important things to do.
If the WORLD blacklists them, then they will listen.
Blacklists are not a long term solution.. they do hurt the innocent... but how do you get through to the ISP who doesn't care, and a government who doesn't care or is unable to police things?
- The multicast group they are using is for link-local addressing only. It's not supposed to cross subnets anyway. By DESIGN it's not supposed to discover remote services. If there are routers.. the idea is that mDNS can be used to discover the local fixed resources (DNS servers, gateways, etc) and then things can be located by other traditional (or new) protocols.
They should adopt rendezvous because it's open, and dead easy, and extremely useful, especially for portable devices.
- Yes, it does automatic IP allocation if there is no DHCP server.. so does Windows (though apple is much faster at it for some reason).
- mDNS is not to be confused with "The global DNS system" that you use to lookup Address records, etc, though it can do that. mDNS is DNS adapted to multicast, for service and host discovery. HOw?
- Instead of querying a DNS server, you query a multicast group (the link-local group in this case) and say "Who has a webserver?" or "who has ssh?" or "hey FOO, what is your IP?" or.. more importantly "Who is a real internet DNS server?" or "Who has an internet gateway?". "Who else is running itunes?".
- a machine joining the network will broadcast once, to send out that it has joined, and what services it has, also via mDNS... so anyone listening can update their caches, etc. The opposite happens when it leaves.
This does not create an extra burden of traffic. Previous to this, most protocols that need to find something in the network do so by rather rude broadcasts.. and usually generate quite a bit of unnecessary traffic.
YES, having a set infrastructure, DNS servers, DHCP, etc, and using DHCP to hardcode everything else, avoiding the need for local network discovery is more efficient. The point is, this works very well WITHOUT any infrastructure.. like 10 guys sitting in a conference room with wireless cards and no servers... or 3 guys on the bus. etc.
NO, rendezvous does not grant ACCESS to your computer.. it merely discovers advertised services... much like an X browser can find a bunch of remote X desktops, or windows TS can find all the terminal servers in the network, or the "network neighborhood" list is populated in windows. It's just a more elegant, scaleable approach.
- mDNS is *not* dns... it is mDNS but if you understand DNS you will understand mDNS. They chose to not make a new protocol, and instead adapt an existing one... which makes it much easier to learn and work with.
Multicasts you mean? Effectively the same in this context.. but still.
A tiny UDP multicast is no worse than the typical windows broadcasts or arp broadcast that happens in a network... and this is just for service discovery generally, not normal net-wise DNS lookups. That means things will be looked up once and cached. (service discovery could be, by the way "WHO HAS A DNS SERVER"or "WHO IS A NET GATEWAY")
That means, provided a large network has proper multicast aware switches, traffic is minimized.
This is not a replacement for DHCP; it is not meant to scale really huge. it is meant to be able to plug in a machine and have things work in the absence of infrastructure.
Now what I'm wondering is.. what awkwardness is it you are referring to in mixing macs and pcs? We have macs and pcs here, and everything works just fine.
The court judgement was that the wiretap laws did not apply in this case.
The wiretap laws also do not apply to the snail-mail system.. yet we have laws that make intercepting snail-mail a felony.
There is room for good privacy laws... laws like we have in canada where "Any communication where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy is private"
It is reasonable that an ISP's techs can read email in the course of maintaing their systems. It is also reasonable for them to maintain the privacy of their customer's information.
The US Cellular phone systems: It is illegal to intercept unscrambled cellular phone calls on public airwaves...
Why is that? Becuase In America, nobody can cooperate unless the government forces them to?
These companies are free to agree amongst themselves how to use their devices to minimize interference and whatnot.. it's in everyone's best intersts to do so. Everyone can win. What they cannot do is force each other to do this.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken (and I concede that I may be)... the position of Prime Minister is, interestingly, not defined by law... the Prime Minister is simply the leader of the ruling party. There does not have to be one if the party wished to structure itself differently.
Not everything is black and white.. often there is no perfect reasonable solution.
Telus is doing good here... if the complaints from the customers who want to direct-dial these countries are louder than those who are getting ripped off, telus will change things.
This is simply being responsible, without spending a great deal of time and effort.
Just because they chose this solution to make theri customers happier in this instance does not mean they will do the same if the problem is more widespread (in which case they might launch an investigation,, cooperate with international authorities, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Stage one - May 18, 2001
* The 10-day cooling off period takes effect. This applies only to goods or services worth $50 or more that are not delivered at the time of sale or paid in full at the time of purchase.
Stage two - August 3, 2001
* The cooling off period will be extended to apply to all sales made at the consumer's home, whether the goods are delivered or services are provided at the time of sale or afterwards, and regardless of whether payment is made in full or in part.
* The only exception to the cooling off period is in a case of emergency home repairs, and then the consumer must have approached the seller and have requested the services to be provided within 10 days of receiving the written contract.
* Consumers may cancel any direct sales contract if goods are not received or services not provided within 30 days of the date promised.
* All direct sales contracts must include:
o a description of the item and price
o delivery dates and charges
o start and completion dates, and
o the buyer and seller's name and address.
Can you back that up with a link, from even one state?
I've seen many people who feel there is such a law in their state province, and invariably, from what I've seen, there almost never is.
There ARE such laws in many jurisdictions when it comes to things such as property and vehicles.. but they are quite specific.
I would be very, very surprised if a legal, non-fraudulent sale item had to be taken back by the seller, no matter what, within three days.
but only in situations where it would present the only way to move data out of the company without getting caught.
Most companies have wide open internet connections, and it's trivial to just upload stuff elsewhere. OR email it.
OR stick it on a CDR/DVDR
Or stick it on a bigass portable firewire hard drive.
If you are in a sensitive, secure environment, where all the above are disabled and/or forbidden.. and you work in isolation, then of COURSE you don't allow your staff to pack in an iPod.
THere is this attitude, especially in the US/Canada, that the customer is ALWAYS correct, and that large stores are moneybags just to be exploited.
A store that offers rebates that cause them to lose money takes a risk. THat's a fact, finding ways to mitigate that risk is a good idea. Offering more sane deals is a better one.
Some customers ARE a pain in the ass, and not worth dealing with. Buying things to claim rebates and return the item afterwards for a full refund is , if not illegal, dishonest, and morally wrong. THe store didn't even have ot take it back in the first place, let alone give you a rebate.
Well.. if the return policy does not require to you to return the rebate cupons un-filled out.. then there is nothing wrong with an employee suggesting this.
The problem is a broken return policy.
HEck.. the problem is a return policy at all!
A business is under no obligation legally to take back a returned item once sold, as long as it is not defective and was not sold under false pretenses. Businesses like BestBuy take returns in the first place as a courtesy to customers, because it's something people expect from large stores.
So you feel a business should not have the right to treat better customers better?
Whether you like it or not, a bank is a business, and those who the banks make more money off get better service.. that's BUSINESS.
IF I walk into my bank, past you, and go into a side office where I deal with my personal banker, while you wait in line, do you feel that you have been done an injustice?
What if I walk into the grocery store, where I buy supplies for my restaurant on occasion, and the owner opens up a register on a busy day JUST to deal with me, so I can get in and out of there quickly? DO you feel you have been done an injustice?
If you don't like the customer service you are offered, you are free to spend your money elsewhere.
YES, the packages are out of date. I'm talking about STABLE>
The fact that I can use UNSTABLE which has more or less modern packages in it, but might fuck up on any given day when doing an upate means i lose the benefit of using debian in the first place, and it's totally unsuitable for production use on lots of servers.
Sure, if you have one workstation, or one pet server, it's acceptable, easily. If you want a few dozen scattered around the globe, it's not.
"Oh yeah the NEW BETA version has those new features" is a microsoft like excuse...what you are saying comes awfully close to that.
Yes, I understand exactly what unstable means in this context.
You are right; I don't want things to go out of whack just like that.... major revisions of things, especially things like postgres, etc, should not change within one version, requiring reformat of databses, etc. what I *do* want is a STABLE release sooner than every 2 years, with more modern packages that aren't 2 YEARS out of date by the time the next version of debian makes it stable.
I don't want to have to use backports and experimental packages just to use packages that are already a year old and in production *everywhere*.
IN other words, if debian just lessened the scope of what is required to be integrated and stable, got it down to a more realistic set of packages, it would be fine.
Disagree.
What we need is for the core packages to be much smaller, and not change often.
Give us a core around which everything else is built that can be relied upon.. and that is up to date.
I should not have to wait for a thousand other packages, many of them very complex, and not necessarily popular, to perfectly integrate before I can use a newer version of apace or postgresql.
Unstable does NOT mean it will crash, not at all.. unstable means the layout and dependencies are not stable, and prone to change from update to update.
I cannot afford to run an update and have dependencies break partway through.
As a workstation, I would not hesitate to run unstable, not at all.. as such quirks can be easily dealt with.
Yes, I can test on another machine.... but that can be difficult in practice.. a certian level of stability of updates is needed.
Fixing things by hand is very difficult..
Yes i am perfectly capable of building from source, or using another package format... or using backports from somewhere else for updated packages.. but that defeats a large part of hte purpose for running debian.
They are so far out of whack with reality, what's another year? who cares?
What they NEED to do is strip down the core distribution and produce major updates faster.
That debian is still widely used despite being in the stone age is a testimony to all the things they are doing right.. now they just NEED to get releases under control.
I was at a friends, he had is 520-ST partially disassembled (enclosure unscrewed).
I was peeking inside, with it off, lifting out the keyboard, which is attached to the mainboard, more or less. I set this down, by accident near the back of the machine, where the exposed AC power supply was.
One quick snap and a flash, and that was a dead ST.
Steve: I still owe you an ST, and I haven't forgotten.
The same place it is in the arctic, where the surface temperature is 60 degrees below the freezing point of water. Under the ice.
Okay, but this is irrelevant to the article. You can implment something badly in any language.
I think you would be surprised how many large projects use PHP very successfully.
I don't know anyone who has ever used PHP for an internal site search.. especially in a large project environment. Searches belong to databases.
Yeah.. so?
Not every country works just like the USA. In many countries money talks, that's all. Internet in many places is prohibitively expensive in the first place as far as the local average population is concerned, and may even require bribes to obtain (becuase it's only available for certain reasons, like school, etc, so you have to convince some official that your business is "education" related, etc.)
In these countries, those running the service, which may even be a government monopoly, don't give a crap what goes on with it so long as the money comes in. They answer to nobody, except perhaps a government that equally doesn't give a crap, they have more important things to do.
If the WORLD blacklists them, then they will listen.
Blacklists are not a long term solution.. they do hurt the innocent... but how do you get through to the ISP who doesn't care, and a government who doesn't care or is unable to police things?
- The multicast group they are using is for link-local addressing only. It's not supposed to cross subnets anyway. By DESIGN it's not supposed to discover remote services. If there are routers.. the idea is that mDNS can be used to discover the local fixed resources (DNS servers, gateways, etc) and then things can be located by other traditional (or new) protocols.
They should adopt rendezvous because it's open, and dead easy, and extremely useful, especially for portable devices.
SLP requires configuration.
- This is not Appletalk. IT is new.
- This is open
- The *key* feature is the mDNS system.
- Yes, it does automatic IP allocation if there is no DHCP server.. so does Windows (though apple is much faster at it for some reason).
- mDNS is not to be confused with "The global DNS system" that you use to lookup Address records, etc, though it can do that. mDNS is DNS adapted to multicast, for service and host discovery. HOw?
- Instead of querying a DNS server, you query a multicast group (the link-local group in this case) and say "Who has a webserver?" or "who has ssh?" or "hey FOO, what is your IP?" or.. more importantly "Who is a real internet DNS server?" or "Who has an internet gateway?". "Who else is running itunes?".
- a machine joining the network will broadcast once, to send out that it has joined, and what services it has, also via mDNS... so anyone listening can update their caches, etc. The opposite happens when it leaves.
This does not create an extra burden of traffic. Previous to this, most protocols that need to find something in the network do so by rather rude broadcasts.. and usually generate quite a bit of unnecessary traffic.
YES, having a set infrastructure, DNS servers, DHCP, etc, and using DHCP to hardcode everything else, avoiding the need for local network discovery is more efficient. The point is, this works very well WITHOUT any infrastructure.. like 10 guys sitting in a conference room with wireless cards and no servers... or 3 guys on the bus. etc.
NO, rendezvous does not grant ACCESS to your computer.. it merely discovers advertised services... much like an X browser can find a bunch of remote X desktops, or windows TS can find all the terminal servers in the network, or the "network neighborhood" list is populated in windows. It's just a more elegant, scaleable approach.
- mDNS is *not* dns... it is mDNS but if you understand DNS you will understand mDNS. They chose to not make a new protocol, and instead adapt an existing one... which makes it much easier to learn and work with.
Multicasts you mean?
Effectively the same in this context.. but still.
A tiny UDP multicast is no worse than the typical windows broadcasts or arp broadcast that happens in a network... and this is just for service discovery generally, not normal net-wise DNS lookups. That means things will be looked up once and cached.
(service discovery could be, by the way "WHO HAS A DNS SERVER"or "WHO IS A NET GATEWAY")
That means, provided a large network has proper multicast aware switches, traffic is minimized.
This is not a replacement for DHCP; it is not meant to scale really huge. it is meant to be able to plug in a machine and have things work in the absence of infrastructure.
Now what I'm wondering is.. what awkwardness is it you are referring to in mixing macs and pcs? We have macs and pcs here, and everything works just fine.
The court judgement was that the wiretap laws did not apply in this case.
The wiretap laws also do not apply to the snail-mail system.. yet we have laws that make intercepting snail-mail a felony.
There is room for good privacy laws... laws like we have in canada
where
"Any communication where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy is private"
It is reasonable that an ISP's techs can read email in the course of maintaing their systems. It is also reasonable for them to maintain the privacy of their customer's information.
The US Cellular phone systems: It is illegal to intercept unscrambled cellular phone calls on public airwaves...
It doesn't say that an ISP can read customer's email legally...
all it says is that the WIRETAP laws do not apply.
Why is that?
Becuase In America, nobody can cooperate unless the government forces them to?
These companies are free to agree amongst themselves how to use their devices to minimize interference and whatnot.. it's in everyone's best intersts to do so. Everyone can win. What they cannot do is force each other to do this.
Yes, I understand that.
My point, though, is: when was the last time any of these powers were used?
The Governer General is a rubber stamp.
Yes, she could be a defence against, as you say, a government gone haywire.. but that's about it.
non-competes are not enforcable in many places and conditions as well..
they work against very high level employees.. and have to have some kind of compensation in return.
Even if Orkut said he wouldn't develop something else... that's not necessarily legally binding. A one-sided agreement is not.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken (and I concede that I may be)... the position of Prime Minister is, interestingly, not defined by law... the Prime Minister is simply the leader of the ruling party. There does not have to be one if the party wished to structure itself differently.
OR just do something wild like keeping an index?
Not everything is black and white.. often there is no perfect reasonable solution.
Telus is doing good here... if the complaints from the customers who want to direct-dial these countries are louder than those who are getting ripped off, telus will change things.
This is simply being responsible, without spending a great deal of time and effort.
Just because they chose this solution to make theri customers happier in this instance does not mean they will do the same if the problem is more widespread (in which case they might launch an investigation,, cooperate with international authorities, etc).