User agent sniffing allows you to create a site for mobile phones and tables. I don't think slashdot should become a "responsive site". If they want to spend some time making a mobile site that looks nice on phones and tablets (provided there is a cookie you can use to always see the full site or it respects the fact that you're submitting a desktop user agent string) then ultimately I'm fine with that.
You haven't answered the spirit of my question. The fastest growing platform may very well be global, but this is slashdot, where people come to contribute and foster community, they tend to be nerds like programmers, engineers, and scientists who don't usually do their work on mobile devices, and where typing long things is de jure... I'm going to guess mobile matters substantially less to the average slashdot person and the desktop version that you comment on matters a whole heckuvalot.
And again, we can have our cake and eat it, too. Keep this version of the site, redirect mobile agent strings to "m.slashdot.org" while not making it a piece of shit like beta is....
I think one of the things I really like about the NYPD is that they don't call us New Yorkers their "audience". On the side of the cars they have the words "Community Professionalism Respect".
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
I believe this is absolutely wrong. Why do you think this? Because you can't show it to generic citizen and get them to go "oooh"? When your community pretty much thinks that the two worst things the site is doing are bad quality writeups and changing the UX, it makes me think what you really want is different community.
Whose expectations are higher? Can you write persuasively that the latest UX research matters on a "news for nerds" site? We want to talk about it UX research, but there is a fundamental reason we want the striped down look with a focus on comment features. What few needed tweaks would make slashdot suck in 2018 if they were *never* done? What will this design not cut in 2018?
You know the first thing I think when I see beta? I crave the high contrast of the real slashdot with its obvious separation of elements clearly delineated for rapid visual processing. Then I look at the comments section, and everything just bleeds together like some sort of horrible endless sea of white. Look at classic, a clearly defined title bar with a nice subbar. It FEELS better. Like classic is the improvement on "beta".
Also, notice how the "contribute" links are always well distanced from the comments on classic and not on beta? They complete the "Framed" look that allows you to so rapidly assimilate information in classic and make it clear what the user is supposed to do next. Also, those heavy underlines really scream "I'm a functional thing to do". What is wrong with underlines that has been uncovered in the latest UX research?
Classic has full use of horizontal space, and there's a sidebar which tells me about *me* so I can follow threads I've been talking in right off the bat. UX should be about getting the people the links they want to see, right?
In every way but possibly in the "pleasing people who love gradients, drop shadows, and low contrasts that blind old people" department, classic is more readable, usable, functional, and "feel good". You are futzing with a popular brand, and I can only assume that is because you do not valuable the people for whom this is an everyday part of their lives.
One place where techies earn a lot less than $100k / year is the UK. Not a country you'd associate with little money...
Well, there are numerous problems with this comparison. You want to measure real wage, not the money wage. The real wage/money wage ratio for Britain is probably obviously higher than that for the US worker. Consider, a British pound trades for 1.65 US Dollars right now. After that, you factor in taxes (everyone loves to do that, right?) .
And, then you factor in things like standard of living. Everyone loves to point out the increased gas costs and rent, but not underline the fact that more people don't own a car, or even feel like they need to, because of public transportation. Like, I live in NYC because I hate driving, so it's a "feature" to me. YMMV. Google employees, for instance, save money because of amenities like the Google busses we're hearing so much about. Then you have to factor in the social services that are provided for each country. It is a lot cheaper to be pregnant in Britain. Yes, because the taxes are higher, but if you factor in taxes, you have to factor in what you're getting for them.
I haven't done the work, but I'd be interested in the results.
Noooooooo no no no no. In a free market i.e. one without regulation, collusion certainly CAN and DOES happen. However, by the nature of collusion - where each participant has incentives to screw over the other participants, or non-participants can take advantage of the collusion - it is an unstable, temporary arrangement, and will fall apart sooner rather than later. In this example, say that the employees of the colluding companies are making $100k/year whereas they are really worth $120k/year. Non-colluding companies can now easily poach these employees by offering them, say, $110k/year. The more companies do this the more the wages are brought to their proper level.
I'll bite. I do think that RMS has a point about the open source compiler of record being under the GPL, as well as the operating system and other essential build tools and core platform elements. Many people will rightly point out, yet again, that GPL is a pretty aggressive license for most userland software, but when it comes to the platform itself, this aggression seems to be quite desirable. Also, these value statements seem temporally bound to the moment. Maybe in the future we will live in a set of legal and intellectual circumstances where RMS has basically won and that maybe a good thing.
So I wonder he isn't right about it being sad that LLVM is not under copyleft.
Hmm, so you're saying that if we're going to have legal handguns, then we should let retired cops have concealed handguns because given the first variable, total safety for everyone else improves? Even if that is so, the problem is that he didn't cite a study and used the phrase "study after study" in a polemic issue with highly charged emotions. For that, he was up moderated. To my lights, this degrades the quality of the discussion on Slashdot, and I wanted to point that out.
Ahh, I like so much that you qualified your views as speculation. But, that said, your speculations are interesting to me. I find myself agreeing that it is highly plausible that economic disparity , more specifically a very low "real wage" for many people seeking employment, absolutely are factors in overall gun violence, as well as cultural oppression, etc.
One would argue that many people think they can code better projects and do (Say, an unknown Finnish student in 1992). There is a ton of duplication in the software space, but that might not be a bad thing. I think it is so easy to forget that we're building things that may last centuries, millenia. Individual information problems may morph under hardware changes, but a lot of these things we're figuring out could go the distance. I hope the open source movement never loses that audacity, even if it a times it is blind, arrogant, and wrong.
That was because the FSF was spreading FUD about Trolltech. Trolltech was free software friendly and was never going to make Qt non-free.
Licenses matter, especially for businesses. You have to know that this piece of software you want to build things around, to rely on, isn't going to be taken from you. And, you shouldn't have to be a "judge of character" for a business in order to have that security. FUD is a heavy characterization that seems to devalue the perspective of those who do feel they need to operate under license security.
Ancillary effects of poor health are economic losses due to less reliability of getting work, working, etc. Bad health fuels poverty. Poverty eats at labor markets which drive up costs of goods for everyone. What is interesting is that the cost of projected health care increase alone is sufficient to get close to being equal to the money saved. Want to start projecting the costs of extra prisons, lawyers, cops, and judges to deal with the extra crime? How about we bring in some ethics: we're quibbling over 5 billion which represents 0.03% of our GDP for the purposes of starving some more poor people. Frankly, I'd take the less crime, even if I were completely heartless.
It seems to me that we have plenty of money and food and could easily create a policy situation that would feed and clothe most Americans reasonably well. I think even housing could be "reasonable" or at least much improved. But, for the political will.... How dare we suggest that the upper middle class or the upper upper upper classes didn't completely earn everything?
Also, it isn't a zero sum game. Doubling the minimum wage and fixing it to inflation may be an economic engine that improves everyone's lives. I think you probably agree, but I wouldn't cede points to the idea that we couldn't do it.
I do love your epic, hilarious rebuttals of people's bullshit motivations arguments!
Except that study after study shows that in places where there are more concealed carry permits are places where there are fewer murders (as well as just less violent crime in general, especially in public settings). In broad terms, retired cops carrying in public is a net benefit. Regardless of how this particular altercation turned out.
Citation needed. I feel like this statement requires more than just the phrase "study after study".
From Wikipedia
Martin Killias, in a 1993 study covering 21 countries, found that there were significant correlations between gun ownership and gun-related suicide and homicide rates.
I saw a pamphlet once that asserted that first world countries with tough gun laws had just as much violent crimes as the US does, but what they forgot to mention was that much less of the violence was committed with a gun and there was less gun-related murder. There are also statistical regressions that show that murders per capita drop when guns are tightly controlled.
These countries also score as highly as the US on the Index of Economic Freedom and higher on other freedom indices like personal freedom. So, do countries really need to be afraid of their citizens' guns? Guns do not seem to be a keystone to a modern free democracy.
You can find countries that score low on all indices and yet have really strong gun laws, but my point is that guns do not seem to be necessary for scaring the government. I doubt very much that guns scare our government all that much. I think Aaron Swartz scared the hell out of our government with a laptop computer. Maybe we should have a laptop amendment.
Gun laws and the discussions of them require more nuance and appreciation of methodology than we are generally capable of in day to day discourse, because there is emotional investment and, consequently, bias, even in academic circles in the US.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one knows what kernel it's running, does it make a sound?
Since there are cross-cutting concerns between the platforms, the answer is yes. People know that this runs Linux, more people will spend time developing for Linux, some of those developments might have a positive impact on the desktop or people maybe more likely to install it as their desktop.
Uhh, I used QWES because I was a tank in WoW. I imagine many other tanks in WoW learned the same style. WoW had Q and E be the strafing keys and A and D were nonsense keys for turning. You were a BAD tank if you turned... Of course many bad tanks are going to respond to this justifying the ability to turn with the keyboard, but there was never ever a reason to do anything but strafe. To me, this de-emphasizes back peddling and makes it more likely that you want to move forward, a trait I've found positive in FPS's where I now use the style exclusively as well.
Due to inertia, the stars would continue to travel at their current speeds if nothing were pushing and pulling on them. As it is, whatever gravitational forces are acting upon them at the moment might be comparatively insignificant to their current inertia.
So how did they get their current inertia? They might have gotten it from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core without setting their vector towards the core. They could do so possibly using a gravity slingshot effect. So it is surprising they're not coming from the core, as the article states. So what is interesting about these stars is they don't seem to be explained by the slingshot effect.
Further, gravity is a force of attraction and so does no pushing.
Also, I did a knapkin calculation of the speeds involved and it would be 1/700th the speed of light except the article says that this speed is relative to the movement of the galaxy and not an absolute speed like the slashdot summary intimates.
If the promise of self-driving cars includes the idea that the self-driving car will rarely ever be in error and will at least be far less likely to be in error than a human driver, then it seems probable to me that a human being being alert enough and able to correct the self-driving car may make things worse by trying to intercede both legally and in terms of actual outcome.
Also, market forces might cause insurance companies to offer lower rates for cars that are self-driving, and eventually much lower rates, because they know they will almost never have to fork over the money and they want that market. At some point, courts and the general public will figure out that it was almost certainly the fault of a human-driven car and as such, liability may end up being nearly always on the human driven car, driving up insurance for cars built for or intended to be used by humans drivers.
Human drivers might end up being priced out by the rising costs of gas (self-driving cars are probably going to be more economical), liability, and so forth. Once a car can really be self-driving, we can have probably pretty damn cheap self-driving taxis and "minivans" which use algorithms to pickup multiple people in a small area who want to go to a similar place, further driving down the costs of transportation, gas, liability, etc.
It might also have an impact on health care costs, as accidents cost the state, insurance, and patients, lots of money in hospital care for accidents. Certainly avoiding the negative economic impact of losing valuable people (aren't we all valuable?) to car crashes will also probably fuel legislation that makes it ever harder/costlier/illegal for a human to drive a car on a public road.
Of course they have legal redress. Well, maybe not totally legal, but accepted in the current environment. You tell the customer to pay what you think they owe, even though they have the product. If they don't pay, you can file with the local courts, which cost money, or stick it on their credit report. It may be dirty, but not illegal. They'll get a world of bad press from it though.
They should have sucked up the GOOD press about it. "Wooo, we screwed up and gave stuff away for free! Enjoy! And here's our latest offer, 25% off new purchases! Coupon code: WESCREWEDUP"
Someone didn't pass the customer relations portion of their training.
This seems too facile a statement. We don't know their cash flow or projected cash flow, whether the PR hit would quantitatively affect the bottom line worse than eating the bad press and recovering the funds, etc. For proof of a company having terrible PR but making windfall profits, look at Walmart. PR is, and always should be, just one consideration.
Interesting, however I would expect that certain individuals had a much broader platform, like Oprah. These days, I'm going to guess that people who regularly use yelp and write reviews, or people who have a lot of twitter followers, might have much broader power to affect consumer decision. There are people on the internet who are not famous whose output I have found and now regard as more trustworthy and interesting than a randomly selected newspaper article. Microbloggers with significant followers come to mind.
Except that the exposure of this error is much more contained in a brick and mortar. Websites can scale up rapidly before the error is noticed. If a store suddenly started selling the same thing at a tremendous discount and the store exploded to several hundred times its normal conversion or volume, probably the most dense cashier would notice that something was off quite quickly. Stores also often have a floor manager who would certainly notice this change in volume and probably react by figuring our there was a deal too good to be true.
Also, it is unclear whether Brick's business model took a greater hit, has less of a safety margin, or a greater method for making markups. Delta still may end up charging a fair bit and come close to recouping its costs on "value-added" things like luggage costs. Moreover, is the Brick's business model as driven by repeat business and reputation? We've seen plenty of businesses get negative attention and ultimately drive more traffic as a result. Some people love a good backlash. The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.
Finally, there is the moral and legal justification. Why should a business be held to such a mistake? IANAL, but I remember a contract being considered invalid if there was insufficient consideration for one party. This seems appropriate, at least in spirit. The business made a flagrant, possibly very easy mistake, and I'm going to guess most customers reasonably assumed that it was a mistake and took advantage, anyway. If the argument is that the business should have installed safeguards against such eventualities, like algorithms to detect egregious discounts from the subtotal, then they are already well motivated by the PR issues that can result, as well as the loss in time it takes to recover or correct the problem for each second the discount is erroneously available.
I'm going to guess if these businesses were sole proprietors in a neighborhood climate that the people would have been less likely to take advantage, more likely to tell the proprietor, and less likely to grouse if asked to return the product or pay the difference. Hundreds of people make their livelihoods in these respective businesses and millions are affected by the cost offsets the businesses would have to do to recover from the errors. There is more to this story than the solitary consumer's point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, like me, lost access to their first id. (I no longer have access to the original email account and I had forgotten the password)
I hear it's going to be called "Dungeon Keeper Beta".
User agent sniffing allows you to create a site for mobile phones and tables. I don't think slashdot should become a "responsive site". If they want to spend some time making a mobile site that looks nice on phones and tablets (provided there is a cookie you can use to always see the full site or it respects the fact that you're submitting a desktop user agent string) then ultimately I'm fine with that.
You haven't answered the spirit of my question. The fastest growing platform may very well be global, but this is slashdot, where people come to contribute and foster community, they tend to be nerds like programmers, engineers, and scientists who don't usually do their work on mobile devices, and where typing long things is de jure... I'm going to guess mobile matters substantially less to the average slashdot person and the desktop version that you comment on matters a whole heckuvalot.
And again, we can have our cake and eat it, too. Keep this version of the site, redirect mobile agent strings to "m.slashdot.org" while not making it a piece of shit like beta is....
I think one of the things I really like about the NYPD is that they don't call us New Yorkers their "audience". On the side of the cars they have the words "Community Professionalism Respect".
Seems to have been slashdotted.
I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve.
We've uncovered your problem. It is this axiom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
I believe this is absolutely wrong. Why do you think this? Because you can't show it to generic citizen and get them to go "oooh"? When your community pretty much thinks that the two worst things the site is doing are bad quality writeups and changing the UX, it makes me think what you really want is different community.
Whose expectations are higher? Can you write persuasively that the latest UX research matters on a "news for nerds" site? We want to talk about it UX research, but there is a fundamental reason we want the striped down look with a focus on comment features. What few needed tweaks would make slashdot suck in 2018 if they were *never* done? What will this design not cut in 2018?
You know the first thing I think when I see beta? I crave the high contrast of the real slashdot with its obvious separation of elements clearly delineated for rapid visual processing. Then I look at the comments section, and everything just bleeds together like some sort of horrible endless sea of white. Look at classic, a clearly defined title bar with a nice subbar. It FEELS better. Like classic is the improvement on "beta".
Also, notice how the "contribute" links are always well distanced from the comments on classic and not on beta? They complete the "Framed" look that allows you to so rapidly assimilate information in classic and make it clear what the user is supposed to do next. Also, those heavy underlines really scream "I'm a functional thing to do". What is wrong with underlines that has been uncovered in the latest UX research?
Classic has full use of horizontal space, and there's a sidebar which tells me about *me* so I can follow threads I've been talking in right off the bat. UX should be about getting the people the links they want to see, right?
In every way but possibly in the "pleasing people who love gradients, drop shadows, and low contrasts that blind old people" department, classic is more readable, usable, functional, and "feel good". You are futzing with a popular brand, and I can only assume that is because you do not valuable the people for whom this is an everyday part of their lives.
Why we need a new site? We're nerds, we're okay with shit looking like this forever, because it is about content and not presentation.
One place where techies earn a lot less than $100k / year is the UK. Not a country you'd associate with little money...
Well, there are numerous problems with this comparison. You want to measure real wage, not the money wage. The real wage/money wage ratio for Britain is probably obviously higher than that for the US worker. Consider, a British pound trades for 1.65 US Dollars right now. After that, you factor in taxes (everyone loves to do that, right?) .
And, then you factor in things like standard of living. Everyone loves to point out the increased gas costs and rent, but not underline the fact that more people don't own a car, or even feel like they need to, because of public transportation. Like, I live in NYC because I hate driving, so it's a "feature" to me. YMMV. Google employees, for instance, save money because of amenities like the Google busses we're hearing so much about. Then you have to factor in the social services that are provided for each country. It is a lot cheaper to be pregnant in Britain. Yes, because the taxes are higher, but if you factor in taxes, you have to factor in what you're getting for them.
I haven't done the work, but I'd be interested in the results.
Noooooooo no no no no. In a free market i.e. one without regulation, collusion certainly CAN and DOES happen. However, by the nature of collusion - where each participant has incentives to screw over the other participants, or non-participants can take advantage of the collusion - it is an unstable, temporary arrangement, and will fall apart sooner rather than later. In this example, say that the employees of the colluding companies are making $100k/year whereas they are really worth $120k/year. Non-colluding companies can now easily poach these employees by offering them, say, $110k/year. The more companies do this the more the wages are brought to their proper level.
I feel like the first two chapters of http://www.scribd.com/doc/1139... do a really good job of showing you to be wrong.
I'll bite. I do think that RMS has a point about the open source compiler of record being under the GPL, as well as the operating system and other essential build tools and core platform elements. Many people will rightly point out, yet again, that GPL is a pretty aggressive license for most userland software, but when it comes to the platform itself, this aggression seems to be quite desirable. Also, these value statements seem temporally bound to the moment. Maybe in the future we will live in a set of legal and intellectual circumstances where RMS has basically won and that maybe a good thing.
So I wonder he isn't right about it being sad that LLVM is not under copyleft.
Hmm, so you're saying that if we're going to have legal handguns, then we should let retired cops have concealed handguns because given the first variable, total safety for everyone else improves? Even if that is so, the problem is that he didn't cite a study and used the phrase "study after study" in a polemic issue with highly charged emotions. For that, he was up moderated. To my lights, this degrades the quality of the discussion on Slashdot, and I wanted to point that out.
Ahh, I like so much that you qualified your views as speculation. But, that said, your speculations are interesting to me. I find myself agreeing that it is highly plausible that economic disparity , more specifically a very low "real wage" for many people seeking employment, absolutely are factors in overall gun violence, as well as cultural oppression, etc.
One would argue that many people think they can code better projects and do (Say, an unknown Finnish student in 1992). There is a ton of duplication in the software space, but that might not be a bad thing. I think it is so easy to forget that we're building things that may last centuries, millenia. Individual information problems may morph under hardware changes, but a lot of these things we're figuring out could go the distance. I hope the open source movement never loses that audacity, even if it a times it is blind, arrogant, and wrong.
That was because the FSF was spreading FUD about Trolltech. Trolltech was free software friendly and was never going to make Qt non-free.
Licenses matter, especially for businesses. You have to know that this piece of software you want to build things around, to rely on, isn't going to be taken from you. And, you shouldn't have to be a "judge of character" for a business in order to have that security. FUD is a heavy characterization that seems to devalue the perspective of those who do feel they need to operate under license security.
Ancillary effects of poor health are economic losses due to less reliability of getting work, working, etc. Bad health fuels poverty. Poverty eats at labor markets which drive up costs of goods for everyone. What is interesting is that the cost of projected health care increase alone is sufficient to get close to being equal to the money saved. Want to start projecting the costs of extra prisons, lawyers, cops, and judges to deal with the extra crime? How about we bring in some ethics: we're quibbling over 5 billion which represents 0.03% of our GDP for the purposes of starving some more poor people. Frankly, I'd take the less crime, even if I were completely heartless.
BTW, love reading your posts in general!
It seems to me that we have plenty of money and food and could easily create a policy situation that would feed and clothe most Americans reasonably well. I think even housing could be "reasonable" or at least much improved. But, for the political will.... How dare we suggest that the upper middle class or the upper upper upper classes didn't completely earn everything?
Also, it isn't a zero sum game. Doubling the minimum wage and fixing it to inflation may be an economic engine that improves everyone's lives. I think you probably agree, but I wouldn't cede points to the idea that we couldn't do it.
I do love your epic, hilarious rebuttals of people's bullshit motivations arguments!
Except that study after study shows that in places where there are more concealed carry permits are places where there are fewer murders (as well as just less violent crime in general, especially in public settings). In broad terms, retired cops carrying in public is a net benefit. Regardless of how this particular altercation turned out.
Citation needed. I feel like this statement requires more than just the phrase "study after study".
From Wikipedia
Martin Killias, in a 1993 study covering 21 countries, found that there were significant correlations between gun ownership and gun-related suicide and homicide rates.
Here is the link to the study, if you would like to question its methodology. http://www.unicri.eu/documentation_centre/publications/series/understanding/19_GUN_OWNERSHIP.pdf
I saw a pamphlet once that asserted that first world countries with tough gun laws had just as much violent crimes as the US does, but what they forgot to mention was that much less of the violence was committed with a gun and there was less gun-related murder. There are also statistical regressions that show that murders per capita drop when guns are tightly controlled.
These countries also score as highly as the US on the Index of Economic Freedom and higher on other freedom indices like personal freedom. So, do countries really need to be afraid of their citizens' guns? Guns do not seem to be a keystone to a modern free democracy.
You can find countries that score low on all indices and yet have really strong gun laws, but my point is that guns do not seem to be necessary for scaring the government. I doubt very much that guns scare our government all that much. I think Aaron Swartz scared the hell out of our government with a laptop computer. Maybe we should have a laptop amendment.
Gun laws and the discussions of them require more nuance and appreciation of methodology than we are generally capable of in day to day discourse, because there is emotional investment and, consequently, bias, even in academic circles in the US.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one knows what kernel it's running, does it make a sound?
Since there are cross-cutting concerns between the platforms, the answer is yes. People know that this runs Linux, more people will spend time developing for Linux, some of those developments might have a positive impact on the desktop or people maybe more likely to install it as their desktop.
Uhh, I used QWES because I was a tank in WoW. I imagine many other tanks in WoW learned the same style. WoW had Q and E be the strafing keys and A and D were nonsense keys for turning. You were a BAD tank if you turned... Of course many bad tanks are going to respond to this justifying the ability to turn with the keyboard, but there was never ever a reason to do anything but strafe. To me, this de-emphasizes back peddling and makes it more likely that you want to move forward, a trait I've found positive in FPS's where I now use the style exclusively as well.
Due to inertia, the stars would continue to travel at their current speeds if nothing were pushing and pulling on them. As it is, whatever gravitational forces are acting upon them at the moment might be comparatively insignificant to their current inertia.
So how did they get their current inertia? They might have gotten it from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core without setting their vector towards the core. They could do so possibly using a gravity slingshot effect. So it is surprising they're not coming from the core, as the article states. So what is interesting about these stars is they don't seem to be explained by the slingshot effect.
Further, gravity is a force of attraction and so does no pushing.
Also, I did a knapkin calculation of the speeds involved and it would be 1/700th the speed of light except the article says that this speed is relative to the movement of the galaxy and not an absolute speed like the slashdot summary intimates.
If the promise of self-driving cars includes the idea that the self-driving car will rarely ever be in error and will at least be far less likely to be in error than a human driver, then it seems probable to me that a human being being alert enough and able to correct the self-driving car may make things worse by trying to intercede both legally and in terms of actual outcome.
Also, market forces might cause insurance companies to offer lower rates for cars that are self-driving, and eventually much lower rates, because they know they will almost never have to fork over the money and they want that market. At some point, courts and the general public will figure out that it was almost certainly the fault of a human-driven car and as such, liability may end up being nearly always on the human driven car, driving up insurance for cars built for or intended to be used by humans drivers.
Human drivers might end up being priced out by the rising costs of gas (self-driving cars are probably going to be more economical), liability, and so forth. Once a car can really be self-driving, we can have probably pretty damn cheap self-driving taxis and "minivans" which use algorithms to pickup multiple people in a small area who want to go to a similar place, further driving down the costs of transportation, gas, liability, etc.
It might also have an impact on health care costs, as accidents cost the state, insurance, and patients, lots of money in hospital care for accidents. Certainly avoiding the negative economic impact of losing valuable people (aren't we all valuable?) to car crashes will also probably fuel legislation that makes it ever harder/costlier/illegal for a human to drive a car on a public road.
Of course they have legal redress. Well, maybe not totally legal, but accepted in the current environment. You tell the customer to pay what you think they owe, even though they have the product. If they don't pay, you can file with the local courts, which cost money, or stick it on their credit report. It may be dirty, but not illegal. They'll get a world of bad press from it though.
They should have sucked up the GOOD press about it. "Wooo, we screwed up and gave stuff away for free! Enjoy! And here's our latest offer, 25% off new purchases! Coupon code: WESCREWEDUP"
Someone didn't pass the customer relations portion of their training.
This seems too facile a statement. We don't know their cash flow or projected cash flow, whether the PR hit would quantitatively affect the bottom line worse than eating the bad press and recovering the funds, etc. For proof of a company having terrible PR but making windfall profits, look at Walmart. PR is, and always should be, just one consideration.
Interesting, however I would expect that certain individuals had a much broader platform, like Oprah. These days, I'm going to guess that people who regularly use yelp and write reviews, or people who have a lot of twitter followers, might have much broader power to affect consumer decision. There are people on the internet who are not famous whose output I have found and now regard as more trustworthy and interesting than a randomly selected newspaper article. Microbloggers with significant followers come to mind.
Except that the exposure of this error is much more contained in a brick and mortar. Websites can scale up rapidly before the error is noticed. If a store suddenly started selling the same thing at a tremendous discount and the store exploded to several hundred times its normal conversion or volume, probably the most dense cashier would notice that something was off quite quickly. Stores also often have a floor manager who would certainly notice this change in volume and probably react by figuring our there was a deal too good to be true.
Also, it is unclear whether Brick's business model took a greater hit, has less of a safety margin, or a greater method for making markups. Delta still may end up charging a fair bit and come close to recouping its costs on "value-added" things like luggage costs. Moreover, is the Brick's business model as driven by repeat business and reputation? We've seen plenty of businesses get negative attention and ultimately drive more traffic as a result. Some people love a good backlash. The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.
Finally, there is the moral and legal justification. Why should a business be held to such a mistake? IANAL, but I remember a contract being considered invalid if there was insufficient consideration for one party. This seems appropriate, at least in spirit. The business made a flagrant, possibly very easy mistake, and I'm going to guess most customers reasonably assumed that it was a mistake and took advantage, anyway. If the argument is that the business should have installed safeguards against such eventualities, like algorithms to detect egregious discounts from the subtotal, then they are already well motivated by the PR issues that can result, as well as the loss in time it takes to recover or correct the problem for each second the discount is erroneously available.
I'm going to guess if these businesses were sole proprietors in a neighborhood climate that the people would have been less likely to take advantage, more likely to tell the proprietor, and less likely to grouse if asked to return the product or pay the difference. Hundreds of people make their livelihoods in these respective businesses and millions are affected by the cost offsets the businesses would have to do to recover from the errors. There is more to this story than the solitary consumer's point of view.