Yes they should be obligated if i didn't want it and its not been opened, and you can be damned sure they will take it back if i tell them to or ill physically shove it down their throats and tell my cc company to refuse payment.
No. If the product is as properly described and unfaulted, you don't have a moral right to get them to take it back. They've fairly done their side of the deal; you should have carefully considered whether you wanted the item before purchase. Certain products in certain jurisdictions are subject to additional constraints (especially where those products are actually contracts for ongoing service where the selling is done when the customer isn't "in the store") but those are very much the exceptions.
Yes, many retailers let you return unwanted goods — often provided they're unopened, but not always — yet that's not a statute-induced legal obligation upon them; it's not a right, they didn't have to do it. It's an additional feature of the contract between you and them, added to increase the likelihood that you will purchase from them in the first place; it's a kind of advertising, if you will.
For a Bluray disk, which is pretty cheap and where you can get the whole benefit of it very shortly after opening the packaging, I'd expect the returns policy to be pretty constrained. For something expensive and enduring, I'd expect rather better terms on the returns policy.
I totally agree, however it would seem that in this case the rule applies to returns of defective merchandise as well (as the subject of the story was returning a defective blu-ray).
It depends on the jurisdiction. Some parts of the world don't permit a store to refuse to deal with faulty goods, whatever their sales policy is; statute law trumps contracts pretty much universally. However, that doesn't mean they necessarily have to give the money back — a replacement non-faulted item would often be viewed as an acceptable alternative — and doesn't cover non-faulted returns. (Hire stores exist, but they're quite a different business and charge quite different rates.)
It also doesn't mean that people are allowed to act fraudulently, breaking the item deliberately before returning it and attempting to get a refund. The main thing that stores can do to track this sort of thing is look for unusual levels of returns, either at the store level or at the customer level (depending on data granularity) and if a problem, take action; they're aided by the fact that scumbag fraudsters don't stop at doing it once, though that's also the reason it is a problem in the first place. Since fraud's definitely a felony (or local equivalent), a shop that just tells the customer to get lost and never return is actually being unusually nice; calling the cops would be reasonable if sufficient evidence is available...
You're using the wrong statistic. You should be giving the odds of someone being arrested given that they're male (1,352 per 100,000) vs. them being arrested given that they're female (126 per 100,000).
Also of note, white male arrest rate (1,775 per 100,000) vs. black male arrest rate (4,347 per 100,000).
You've also got to deal with the fact that the actual rate of offending is not necessarily the same either. Race isn't the only relevant factor; for example, the under-employed are more likely to commit a crime against the person, and those sorts of crimes are more likely to attract police attention leading to an arrest. What can we conclude from this? Well, mostly just that getting good statistics is hard, especially when people are involved. Having politicians meddling in the data collection for their own ends just makes it all worse.
Looking at the actual matter down in Florida, the main problem would appear to be that the police decided to not investigate properly; while defending your home or community might be a legal defense against murder, it ought to be one that is examined in court only and not just accepted by police officers. Otherwise it's too easy to let people get away with murder, just because they happen to friendly with the cops (which would be wrong in general, without saying that it necessarily happened in this case though there remains the suspicion). Police officers are given great powers by society, which means that they need to be very carefully kept doing their jobs properly; with power comes responsibility and scrutiny.
A big grain of sand is maybe 0.5 mm in diameter, so 1000 grains of sand is maybe 1/2 a milligram, which isn't much of a beach
Oh, you fail. A miniscule amount of research leads to the conclusion that a grain of sand is 0.67–23 mg, and that a thousand of them could weigh on the order of an ounce (it depends of course on the grade of sand in use, but the order of magnitude is correct).
Exactly what evidence do you present to support this?
I have never met any scientist that wasn't concerned with funding, either for themselves or (if they have tenure) for their research teams. They might care about the other things too, but they really care about money.
No, I'm wrong. I've met a couple of Nobel Prize winners who were still academically active. They were less concerned with money. That's mostly because they had institutions bidding to attract them (an unseemly business, but what happens...)
That really depends on the license terms. In a lot fields (particularly those related to physical things) adding a patent license isn't too big a problem provided the holder isn't being a dick about it. Alas, some holders are scummy and either won't license at all or are usurious about what they charge for it. OTOH, some potential licensees are also just as bad.
It's worse with software, where the pace of innovation's been faster and patents have been awarded rather too easily in the US. There have been things that were patent-worthy, that have seriously pushed innovation forward in the area by rather a lot (e.g., some of the advances in compression and encryption have been really stunning) but not nearly as many of them as there have been patents and that's just encouraged various sorts of leeches and other sorts of low-lifes.
The Chinese government would be insane to try to conquer a continent that could easily be turned into a client state without military action.
Not just that, to hold Australia militarily, they'd also have to hold a lot of the intervening territory through SE Asia. At a minimum, they'd need to also have the Philippines, Indonesia and a fair chunk of Malaysia. I'm not saying that it's impossible for them to do it, but it's a lot of men and materiel outlay to gain somewhere with a probably hostile population when you can get 90% of what you really want without any of the effort.
I'd guess it would only be on the cards if a Hitler-class megalomaniac comes to power in China. Could happen I suppose, but time enough to worry about it when it does.
The really-right answer to this, of course, is to separate the display from the the installer and/or diagnostic executable, and connect over a network socket or something, but in practice this doesn't happen.
I see where this is going. You'll have a graphical installer just for the server-side component of the network-independent installer. (I've seen things at least as bone-headed.)
I've no problem with Weyland, so long as it allows X11 clients to connect. There's buttloads of them out there, and it will take a hugely long time to persuade them to switch. Some simply won't until the other server platforms do; there will need to be deployed Weyland "server" implementations for far more than Linux for X11 to cease to be relevant. In particular, there's X11 servers for both Windows and OSX, and the way they work might point the way for X11 and Weyland to coexist (core and "native" apps using Weyland; X11 for others). Sure, the X11 apps won't have access to all the snazziness of Weyland but the apps will still be largely usable, and that's what really matters.
By your logic we should be happy with TWM and a bunch of X Terminals. Anything beyond that is purely eye candy, of course.
Ah, I remember TWM. I used that for years, and it worked great. (Well, it did once you reprogrammed all the event bindings; the default set were so awful that coding your own was a rite of passage.) I also remember people at the time moaning about how bloated and full of eye candy it was...
With the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization being based out of Australia they should be required to file the case in whatever districts the corporations in question have their headquarters.
But that allows for a different form of abuse. If the potential defendants have their HQs in areas where the federal courts are overloaded with other business, bringing any kind of case against them becomes impossible. You're promoting a greater form of injustice over a lesser one. (East Texas is favorable for bringing patent cases because its got a lower workload of other types of case and now has rather a lot of specialist knowledge in this area of law. It's not necessarily more favorable for winning the cases, but it does reduce the cost of bringing them at all.)
I have no opinion either way though I will point out that it's Australians who paid for the research, not the US, China or Europe so filing for foreign patents whilst making the tech available to Australian companies free of charge would be more logical.
The only sane way to make that work is to allow the waiving of the fee for products sold to Australian consumers, but given how little wireless manufacturing actually happens in Australia, sticking the fee to everyone is actually simpler (and transfers the costs most directly to the beneficiaries of the technological improvement, which is actually damn fair overall). A more general insistence on the lack of patenting would be equivalent to preventing CSIRO from doing any commercialization at all, in which case this research would have just been used to make better radio telescopes.
Yes, a double charge isn't wonderful but getting the benefits of the research used ubiquitously is definitely good, and that really requires commercialization (and hence things like patents and complicated methods of paying).
There seems to be a general assumption by many that the internet was predestined to win out over these other pre-existing nets.
It wasn't.
The winner would have looked a lot like the internet by now. There were a number of research networks around the world that offered relatively high speeds and interesting connectivity; one of them would have spurred the commercial "internet". The one that won was the first to truly crack the problem of how to route messages from any computer to any other on a large scale without having to distribute large databases of network addresses and routes; the killer apps are DNS and EGP/BGP. The corporate closed-garden and BBS models wouldn't have won; the benefit of a single connected world is too large. Heck, it's so large that even fairly repressive dictatorships like Tunisia and Libya couldn't afford to stay out (and look where that led).
water ( aka dihydrogen monoxide ) is far less of a concern with respect to the greenhouse effect than CO2 is.
Actually, you're wrong there overall; the key concern is actually H2O. However, we've got these large bodies of the stuff sitting around in the open (y'know, oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, etc.) that mean there's rather a lot of it already and adding a bit more in one place just shifts the equilibrium a bit. You're more likely to shift rainfall patterns with this than cause extra global warming. CO2 matters in global warming terms because it changes the set-point for the amount of H2O in the air.
Ordering online can be likened to having an designated agent go to another state to purchase something for you and bring it back to you.
Ordering online is exactly like mail order purchasing, and that's been around for a very long time. "On the internet!!!" doesn't automatically make it different from what before (except perhaps in scale).
I ma from the era where for entertainment kids through rocks at each other. i.e. every generation prior to 1995.
Newsflash: kids still love a big empty cardboard box that they can use for pretend play. It can be a cave and a fire engine and a space rocket and bath, all in one afternoon.
Nobody has yet conclusively determined the cause of [ADD or autism], but it appears to be hereditary, at least in part. Suggesting that tablets cause autism is as scientifically irresponsible as saying vaccinations cause autism. Let me be clear here: Nobody knows why these things happen. Anyone who says otherwise should be immediately imposed upon to provide compelling evidence to support their claim, since many studies have been done and no clear answer has emerged yet.
The best conclusion I've heard so far is that it is a complicated genetic susceptibility combined with some kind of environmental insult at the wrong moment. The genetic susceptibility is probably based across a whole raft of interlinked genes (i.e., it's hellishly difficult to hunt down) and nobody's really got any idea about the environmental components; could be viral, bacterial, some kind of poison that most people metabolize well, or even a combination. What is clear is that it's not directly caused by just vaccinations; there's more than enough population-level epidemiological data to say that that hypothesis is total bunk.
Large/Enterprise organizations value version stability more than security? That's poor judgment.
When you've got idiots pushing out significant incompatible major changes in point versions (too much software for me to enumerate) you start to get really keen on version stability too, and such keenness spreads from being just about some pieces of software to being about everything, even where you might think it makes no sense at all. Yes, large enterprises want security, but they also want security from some random asshole on the internet breaking things "for their own good". As a developer, I respond by trying to avoid doing changes that break any public API (or, where that's impossible, to provide a documented mitigation and migration strategy). It constrains my creativity, but people (coders, managers, you name it) downstream love it; it values their time over mine.
Using NIO is about as much fun as using the poll() or kqueue() directly in C, i.e., not at all. It's also full of fussy limitations and restrictions. (Want to use NIO with subprocesses? Hah!) A great chance to make things better was wasted with NIO because its authors didn't know jack about what was actually wrong with IO in Java in the first place.
There is much about Java that is good. The IO classes — whether old style or NIO — are not part of that goodness, and the major point of most Java frameworks seems to be that they hide IO away from sight. (Or databases, but they're really just more fancy IO.)
More accurately, everyone is focussing too much on microbenchmark performance. C++ is a language designed for an inlining-happy compiler with lots of compile-time specialisation. This results in very large code, which means that you end up with a lot of instruction cache churn. That's a total performance killer on modern hardware for large programs, but new features of C++ (with the possible exception of lambdas) are designed to make it even worse.
It doesn't help that C++'s standard library features aren't really all that strong either. Only C is really weaker, but that's a language with a tiny standard library anyway; building your own better version out of the C primitives is quite acceptable. C++ aspires to be better... and fluffs it. Don't believe me? Compare the string handling of C++ with that of Java or C# or Perl or Tcl or... Well, let's say it like this: C++ gives you the pain of the complexity without nearly enough of the gain of well-implemented features.
The biggest problem with most large C++ programs though is in the way they handle memory. On exit, they like to neatly tidy up everything across their virtual memory space to a lovely pristine state with everything perfect. When the OS can do so much more cheaply (at nearly zero cost) and without stalling everything while every last bit is paged back in just so it can be deallocated. If C++ was a programmer, it would be an asshole with OCD. Just exit already! (Before you ask, I do know why it works the way it does. I just think that the net result is one of total fail from a user's perspective; it's making the computer "act stupid" for no truly good reason.)
I honestly don't know how politics is in the UK, but in America I think the costs associated with forcing ISPs to save the entire internet in its every iteration would result in quite a lot of ISPs lobbying against shit like this.
You'd do well to assume that things are relatively similar here. Margins in the ISP business are thin.
Now, if it were up to the ISP's discretion as to what they want to save (Hello the bullshit that will be July 1st) or if the government subsidized a load of their costs, I can see ISPs going for it, but just saying "spend a shitton of money OR ELSE" legislation seems unlikely to survive.
Right now, it's mainly a kite that's being flown by the spooks. They'll run into problems over funding it and from the privacy advocates too. (There was a Tory blathering on about how unacceptable it was on the radio this morning; I turned it off because he sounded like an annoying git, even if he had a point on this matter. Wanting to punch someone in the face before starting your morning commute isn't healthy!)
Of course, if this does get implemented (a sad day if it comes to pass) then it becomes important for all spam headers to be sent on as well, including all the stuff that a responsible ISP would normally filter. Ideally, it should all go to the same Exchange server that all their internal messages are hosted on. After all, Exchange is an enterprise-ready solution!;-)
i think you just proved his point 100%. the retailer acts as a go-between. the manufacturer doesn't exist TO YOU. but they do exist. and they are the one that provides the warranty
While they may well be involved in the implementation of the service that makes the warranty work, the retailer provides the warranty (except in the UK if you've paid by credit card, in which case it is the credit card company that does it formally). It's their responsibility in law to get things fixed for you, and that can't be passed on to anyone else. Of course, the retailer may well just pass the faulty item along to the maker for fixing, but if the maker stalls them or messes about then it's the retailer who has to make you good. They sometimes need reminding of this, but it rarely reaches court these days as the laws in the area are very strict and have to be to avoid trouble from slimy retailers and manufacturers; this area is very well tested in other areas of consumer products, and electronics firms are by-and-large relatively honest. (That's a reflection on how bad some other market sectors have been in the past, really.)
The EU is not forcing to offer Applecare for free. It is forcing Apple to indicate clearly that Apple products sold in the EU are under the 2-year statuary warranty (for defects present in the product before delivery) mandated by law.
Yes, but it is up to Apple to prove that the products were abused, with problems from normal use being something their products should not have. Deliberately jumping up and down on you iPhone counts as voiding the statutory warranty, but simply calling people normally does not. (Yes, there is space in there for court decisions, but the courts are mostly pretty reasonable in this area.)
Which isn't to say that they've got to fix the device on the spot, or offer a temporary replacement while the device is being fixed. It's merely that what you get with an Applecare contract that lasts to 2 years after purchase is largely (in ways that cover most of what customers really care about) what they're mandated to offer anyway as part of the purchase price. The other point is that it is the retailer that has to make this offer, not the manufacturer. Buy online or from an Apple store? Apple has to cover you. Buy from elsewhere, e.g., Walmart? Talk to them. (Consumer protection law doesn't cover how the retailer and manufacturer deal with things between themselves.)
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Yes they should be obligated if i didn't want it and its not been opened, and you can be damned sure they will take it back if i tell them to or ill physically shove it down their throats and tell my cc company to refuse payment.
No. If the product is as properly described and unfaulted, you don't have a moral right to get them to take it back. They've fairly done their side of the deal; you should have carefully considered whether you wanted the item before purchase. Certain products in certain jurisdictions are subject to additional constraints (especially where those products are actually contracts for ongoing service where the selling is done when the customer isn't "in the store") but those are very much the exceptions.
Yes, many retailers let you return unwanted goods — often provided they're unopened, but not always — yet that's not a statute-induced legal obligation upon them; it's not a right, they didn't have to do it. It's an additional feature of the contract between you and them, added to increase the likelihood that you will purchase from them in the first place; it's a kind of advertising, if you will.
For a Bluray disk, which is pretty cheap and where you can get the whole benefit of it very shortly after opening the packaging, I'd expect the returns policy to be pretty constrained. For something expensive and enduring, I'd expect rather better terms on the returns policy.
I totally agree, however it would seem that in this case the rule applies to returns of defective merchandise as well (as the subject of the story was returning a defective blu-ray).
It depends on the jurisdiction. Some parts of the world don't permit a store to refuse to deal with faulty goods, whatever their sales policy is; statute law trumps contracts pretty much universally. However, that doesn't mean they necessarily have to give the money back — a replacement non-faulted item would often be viewed as an acceptable alternative — and doesn't cover non-faulted returns. (Hire stores exist, but they're quite a different business and charge quite different rates.)
It also doesn't mean that people are allowed to act fraudulently, breaking the item deliberately before returning it and attempting to get a refund. The main thing that stores can do to track this sort of thing is look for unusual levels of returns, either at the store level or at the customer level (depending on data granularity) and if a problem, take action; they're aided by the fact that scumbag fraudsters don't stop at doing it once, though that's also the reason it is a problem in the first place. Since fraud's definitely a felony (or local equivalent), a shop that just tells the customer to get lost and never return is actually being unusually nice; calling the cops would be reasonable if sufficient evidence is available...
You're using the wrong statistic. You should be giving the odds of someone being arrested given that they're male (1,352 per 100,000) vs. them being arrested given that they're female (126 per 100,000).
Also of note, white male arrest rate (1,775 per 100,000) vs. black male arrest rate (4,347 per 100,000).
You've also got to deal with the fact that the actual rate of offending is not necessarily the same either. Race isn't the only relevant factor; for example, the under-employed are more likely to commit a crime against the person, and those sorts of crimes are more likely to attract police attention leading to an arrest. What can we conclude from this? Well, mostly just that getting good statistics is hard, especially when people are involved. Having politicians meddling in the data collection for their own ends just makes it all worse.
Looking at the actual matter down in Florida, the main problem would appear to be that the police decided to not investigate properly; while defending your home or community might be a legal defense against murder, it ought to be one that is examined in court only and not just accepted by police officers. Otherwise it's too easy to let people get away with murder, just because they happen to friendly with the cops (which would be wrong in general, without saying that it necessarily happened in this case though there remains the suspicion). Police officers are given great powers by society, which means that they need to be very carefully kept doing their jobs properly; with power comes responsibility and scrutiny.
A big grain of sand is maybe 0.5 mm in diameter, so 1000 grains of sand is maybe 1/2 a milligram, which isn't much of a beach
Oh, you fail. A miniscule amount of research leads to the conclusion that a grain of sand is 0.67–23 mg, and that a thousand of them could weigh on the order of an ounce (it depends of course on the grade of sand in use, but the order of magnitude is correct).
Exactly what evidence do you present to support this?
I have never met any scientist that wasn't concerned with funding, either for themselves or (if they have tenure) for their research teams. They might care about the other things too, but they really care about money.
No, I'm wrong. I've met a couple of Nobel Prize winners who were still academically active. They were less concerned with money. That's mostly because they had institutions bidding to attract them (an unseemly business, but what happens...)
That really depends on the license terms. In a lot fields (particularly those related to physical things) adding a patent license isn't too big a problem provided the holder isn't being a dick about it. Alas, some holders are scummy and either won't license at all or are usurious about what they charge for it. OTOH, some potential licensees are also just as bad.
It's worse with software, where the pace of innovation's been faster and patents have been awarded rather too easily in the US. There have been things that were patent-worthy, that have seriously pushed innovation forward in the area by rather a lot (e.g., some of the advances in compression and encryption have been really stunning) but not nearly as many of them as there have been patents and that's just encouraged various sorts of leeches and other sorts of low-lifes.
Yes, that means conquering Australia
The Chinese government would be insane to try to conquer a continent that could easily be turned into a client state without military action.
Not just that, to hold Australia militarily, they'd also have to hold a lot of the intervening territory through SE Asia. At a minimum, they'd need to also have the Philippines, Indonesia and a fair chunk of Malaysia. I'm not saying that it's impossible for them to do it, but it's a lot of men and materiel outlay to gain somewhere with a probably hostile population when you can get 90% of what you really want without any of the effort.
I'd guess it would only be on the cards if a Hitler-class megalomaniac comes to power in China. Could happen I suppose, but time enough to worry about it when it does.
The biggest insult is, the ending was obviously rushed, but they had PLEANTY of time to tack on a shitty multiplayer function.
Except the multiplayer isn't shitty (unless you're having network problems or you can't play shooters).
Nobody actually writes towards Xlib, they use a toolkit.
Toolkit authors write towards Xlib (or sometimes even raw X protocol). Or were you assuming that toolkits just happened by magic?
The really-right answer to this, of course, is to separate the display from the the installer and/or diagnostic executable, and connect over a network socket or something, but in practice this doesn't happen.
I see where this is going. You'll have a graphical installer just for the server-side component of the network-independent installer. (I've seen things at least as bone-headed.)
I've no problem with Weyland, so long as it allows X11 clients to connect. There's buttloads of them out there, and it will take a hugely long time to persuade them to switch. Some simply won't until the other server platforms do; there will need to be deployed Weyland "server" implementations for far more than Linux for X11 to cease to be relevant. In particular, there's X11 servers for both Windows and OSX, and the way they work might point the way for X11 and Weyland to coexist (core and "native" apps using Weyland; X11 for others). Sure, the X11 apps won't have access to all the snazziness of Weyland but the apps will still be largely usable, and that's what really matters.
By your logic we should be happy with TWM and a bunch of X Terminals. Anything beyond that is purely eye candy, of course.
Ah, I remember TWM. I used that for years, and it worked great. (Well, it did once you reprogrammed all the event bindings; the default set were so awful that coding your own was a rite of passage.) I also remember people at the time moaning about how bloated and full of eye candy it was...
With the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization being based out of Australia they should be required to file the case in whatever districts the corporations in question have their headquarters.
But that allows for a different form of abuse. If the potential defendants have their HQs in areas where the federal courts are overloaded with other business, bringing any kind of case against them becomes impossible. You're promoting a greater form of injustice over a lesser one. (East Texas is favorable for bringing patent cases because its got a lower workload of other types of case and now has rather a lot of specialist knowledge in this area of law. It's not necessarily more favorable for winning the cases, but it does reduce the cost of bringing them at all.)
I have no opinion either way though I will point out that it's Australians who paid for the research, not the US, China or Europe so filing for foreign patents whilst making the tech available to Australian companies free of charge would be more logical.
The only sane way to make that work is to allow the waiving of the fee for products sold to Australian consumers, but given how little wireless manufacturing actually happens in Australia, sticking the fee to everyone is actually simpler (and transfers the costs most directly to the beneficiaries of the technological improvement, which is actually damn fair overall). A more general insistence on the lack of patenting would be equivalent to preventing CSIRO from doing any commercialization at all, in which case this research would have just been used to make better radio telescopes.
Yes, a double charge isn't wonderful but getting the benefits of the research used ubiquitously is definitely good, and that really requires commercialization (and hence things like patents and complicated methods of paying).
There seems to be a general assumption by many that the internet was predestined to win out over these other pre-existing nets.
It wasn't.
The winner would have looked a lot like the internet by now. There were a number of research networks around the world that offered relatively high speeds and interesting connectivity; one of them would have spurred the commercial "internet". The one that won was the first to truly crack the problem of how to route messages from any computer to any other on a large scale without having to distribute large databases of network addresses and routes; the killer apps are DNS and EGP/BGP. The corporate closed-garden and BBS models wouldn't have won; the benefit of a single connected world is too large. Heck, it's so large that even fairly repressive dictatorships like Tunisia and Libya couldn't afford to stay out (and look where that led).
water ( aka dihydrogen monoxide ) is far less of a concern with respect to the greenhouse effect than CO2 is.
Actually, you're wrong there overall; the key concern is actually H2O. However, we've got these large bodies of the stuff sitting around in the open (y'know, oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, etc.) that mean there's rather a lot of it already and adding a bit more in one place just shifts the equilibrium a bit. You're more likely to shift rainfall patterns with this than cause extra global warming. CO2 matters in global warming terms because it changes the set-point for the amount of H2O in the air.
formic acid will fuck you up though... blind, and eventually dead.
As opposed to having gasoline poured over you and then being set on fire?
Ordering online can be likened to having an designated agent go to another state to purchase something for you and bring it back to you.
Ordering online is exactly like mail order purchasing, and that's been around for a very long time. "On the internet!!!" doesn't automatically make it different from what before (except perhaps in scale).
I ma from the era where for entertainment kids through rocks at each other. i.e. every generation prior to 1995.
Newsflash: kids still love a big empty cardboard box that they can use for pretend play. It can be a cave and a fire engine and a space rocket and bath, all in one afternoon.
Nobody has yet conclusively determined the cause of [ADD or autism], but it appears to be hereditary, at least in part. Suggesting that tablets cause autism is as scientifically irresponsible as saying vaccinations cause autism. Let me be clear here: Nobody knows why these things happen. Anyone who says otherwise should be immediately imposed upon to provide compelling evidence to support their claim, since many studies have been done and no clear answer has emerged yet.
The best conclusion I've heard so far is that it is a complicated genetic susceptibility combined with some kind of environmental insult at the wrong moment. The genetic susceptibility is probably based across a whole raft of interlinked genes (i.e., it's hellishly difficult to hunt down) and nobody's really got any idea about the environmental components; could be viral, bacterial, some kind of poison that most people metabolize well, or even a combination. What is clear is that it's not directly caused by just vaccinations; there's more than enough population-level epidemiological data to say that that hypothesis is total bunk.
Large/Enterprise organizations value version stability more than security? That's poor judgment.
When you've got idiots pushing out significant incompatible major changes in point versions (too much software for me to enumerate) you start to get really keen on version stability too, and such keenness spreads from being just about some pieces of software to being about everything, even where you might think it makes no sense at all. Yes, large enterprises want security, but they also want security from some random asshole on the internet breaking things "for their own good". As a developer, I respond by trying to avoid doing changes that break any public API (or, where that's impossible, to provide a documented mitigation and migration strategy). It constrains my creativity, but people (coders, managers, you name it) downstream love it; it values their time over mine.
the fact that NIO isn't promoted very heavily
Using NIO is about as much fun as using the poll() or kqueue() directly in C, i.e., not at all. It's also full of fussy limitations and restrictions. (Want to use NIO with subprocesses? Hah!) A great chance to make things better was wasted with NIO because its authors didn't know jack about what was actually wrong with IO in Java in the first place.
There is much about Java that is good. The IO classes — whether old style or NIO — are not part of that goodness, and the major point of most Java frameworks seems to be that they hide IO away from sight. (Or databases, but they're really just more fancy IO.)
More accurately, everyone is focussing too much on microbenchmark performance. C++ is a language designed for an inlining-happy compiler with lots of compile-time specialisation. This results in very large code, which means that you end up with a lot of instruction cache churn. That's a total performance killer on modern hardware for large programs, but new features of C++ (with the possible exception of lambdas) are designed to make it even worse.
It doesn't help that C++'s standard library features aren't really all that strong either. Only C is really weaker, but that's a language with a tiny standard library anyway; building your own better version out of the C primitives is quite acceptable. C++ aspires to be better... and fluffs it. Don't believe me? Compare the string handling of C++ with that of Java or C# or Perl or Tcl or ... Well, let's say it like this: C++ gives you the pain of the complexity without nearly enough of the gain of well-implemented features.
The biggest problem with most large C++ programs though is in the way they handle memory. On exit, they like to neatly tidy up everything across their virtual memory space to a lovely pristine state with everything perfect. When the OS can do so much more cheaply (at nearly zero cost) and without stalling everything while every last bit is paged back in just so it can be deallocated. If C++ was a programmer, it would be an asshole with OCD. Just exit already! (Before you ask, I do know why it works the way it does. I just think that the net result is one of total fail from a user's perspective; it's making the computer "act stupid" for no truly good reason.)
I honestly don't know how politics is in the UK, but in America I think the costs associated with forcing ISPs to save the entire internet in its every iteration would result in quite a lot of ISPs lobbying against shit like this.
You'd do well to assume that things are relatively similar here. Margins in the ISP business are thin.
Now, if it were up to the ISP's discretion as to what they want to save (Hello the bullshit that will be July 1st) or if the government subsidized a load of their costs, I can see ISPs going for it, but just saying "spend a shitton of money OR ELSE" legislation seems unlikely to survive.
Right now, it's mainly a kite that's being flown by the spooks. They'll run into problems over funding it and from the privacy advocates too. (There was a Tory blathering on about how unacceptable it was on the radio this morning; I turned it off because he sounded like an annoying git, even if he had a point on this matter. Wanting to punch someone in the face before starting your morning commute isn't healthy!)
Of course, if this does get implemented (a sad day if it comes to pass) then it becomes important for all spam headers to be sent on as well, including all the stuff that a responsible ISP would normally filter. Ideally, it should all go to the same Exchange server that all their internal messages are hosted on. After all, Exchange is an enterprise-ready solution! ;-)
i think you just proved his point 100%. the retailer acts as a go-between. the manufacturer doesn't exist TO YOU. but they do exist. and they are the one that provides the warranty
While they may well be involved in the implementation of the service that makes the warranty work, the retailer provides the warranty (except in the UK if you've paid by credit card, in which case it is the credit card company that does it formally). It's their responsibility in law to get things fixed for you, and that can't be passed on to anyone else. Of course, the retailer may well just pass the faulty item along to the maker for fixing, but if the maker stalls them or messes about then it's the retailer who has to make you good. They sometimes need reminding of this, but it rarely reaches court these days as the laws in the area are very strict and have to be to avoid trouble from slimy retailers and manufacturers; this area is very well tested in other areas of consumer products, and electronics firms are by-and-large relatively honest. (That's a reflection on how bad some other market sectors have been in the past, really.)
The EU is not forcing to offer Applecare for free. It is forcing Apple to indicate clearly that Apple products sold in the EU are under the 2-year statuary warranty (for defects present in the product before delivery) mandated by law.
Yes, but it is up to Apple to prove that the products were abused, with problems from normal use being something their products should not have. Deliberately jumping up and down on you iPhone counts as voiding the statutory warranty, but simply calling people normally does not. (Yes, there is space in there for court decisions, but the courts are mostly pretty reasonable in this area.)
Which isn't to say that they've got to fix the device on the spot, or offer a temporary replacement while the device is being fixed. It's merely that what you get with an Applecare contract that lasts to 2 years after purchase is largely (in ways that cover most of what customers really care about) what they're mandated to offer anyway as part of the purchase price. The other point is that it is the retailer that has to make this offer, not the manufacturer. Buy online or from an Apple store? Apple has to cover you. Buy from elsewhere, e.g., Walmart? Talk to them. (Consumer protection law doesn't cover how the retailer and manufacturer deal with things between themselves.)