Could you please explain why the customer should expect the store to not honor the $100 price? Because I would probably look at it and think "huh, I guess it was one of those 'add to cart to see the real price" items."
Or it's a "loss leader" where you might expect "sorry out of stock" should you attempt to actually buy one.
So, I guess the whole thing comes down to: When is an online order 'complete'? When they say 'thanks for your order', and email you a confirmation? (That's what I'd say.) Or when they actually ship? Or when you get the order delivered?
It's complete when the "law of the land" says it is complete. Which varies. Further complicted by it being very easy for buyer and seller to be in different legal jurisdictions. Even for the "seller" to be in multiple jurisdictions.
The retailer is under no obligation to supply the goods at a price they did not offer and agree to
Except that they may well have offered and agreed to that price.It depends exactly how the applicable laws define this process. The "advertised price" may or not be relevent.
The retailer doesn't receive money immediately when your credit card is "charged" ('authorized for payment') -- the charge action, is a pre-authorization to receive a certain amount of money.
The retailer doesn't receive any money until settlement; usually around 30 days after the CC charge, before settled funds can be deposited in the retailer's accounts.
In the past it could take a long time for cheques to "clear" or even be "banked". Similarly when credit/debit card transactions involved carbon papers. But in many places the law was, and quite possibly still is, that the handing over of such documents indicated the time of payment.
If the online store goes ahead with the sale, then they have accepted the error. Once they ship the goods, it is now too late for them to back out of the deal, and escape without causing the customer undue harm.
Depending on the applicable laws accepting the money may have created a binding contract on the store to supply the goods. The obvious complication is if the applicable law is where the customer is; where the store is (either their registered office or where they actually ship from); where the server used physically is or where the URL implies it is.
They only have to honour it (at least in the UK) when they send a confirmation order to your email as a receipt and take payment.
This hasn't stopped cases of online retailers doing things like cancelling orders after the fact. In some cases after money has been transfered by banks. Just because they can do so.
The contract is made when money passes hands and you get your receipt,
A "receipt" dosn't have to be an email. It possibly isn't even necessary at all if you other proof of the seller accepting the money.
until then they can advertise the prices as what they want as much as they want.
The advertised price in the UK has the definition of "an invitation to treat". A starting point for negotiations. The price you pay is that you have negotiated with the seller. Which need not be the advertised price. Even though the "checkout" part of a web store is a machine. The essential steps of "I'd like X of Y"; That'll be £Z, how do you want to pay?"; "Forget it/I'll pay in this way..." are still there.
Then they should only accept as many orders as they have stock. That at least limits the damage to what they have on-hand. just like brick-n-mortar stores.
In many places a "brick-n-mortar store" would be breaking the law if they took money from customers for goods they couldn't supply. Why should a "web store" be viewed differently? If anything a machine should be more able to keep track of orders and stock levels than several people...
In fact, the laws in some states demand that brick and mortar stores to honor the prices that they advertive. This includes prices that are in error!
In other places what matters, in law, is when the customer and vendor have agreed on a price and the customer has paid then the transaction is concluded. Since "vending machines" have been around for thousands of years, in one form or other, using one would not make any difference unless there is a specific law to say so. Similarly non cash based forms of money are not new. With most of the relevent laws probably dating from times where banking records could be days/weeks behind. But a customer would still have been considered to have paid even if their cheque/check wasn't banked until the end of the week/month then took days before their bank even saw it.
Having the source allows us to debug misbehaving software (runnin g strace/ltrace/dtrace and compare the output to the source), it allows us to patch bugs or patch to add new features, it allows us to back-port newer software and recompile software against different library versions.
Many of these can potentially go against a vendors interests. Since then it's you rather than them (or their marketing department) decide what is a "bug" and what is a "feature". Also they may want to be able to sell you new versions of the software. Regardless of if the older version better fits the needs of you and/or your users.
It is when intractable problems crop up. Often, a quick glance at the source gives more insight into what's going on than calling vendor support, as well as saves a lot of time.
Very often vendor "support" can have little or no access to the actual code (or anyone who had any part in writing it). They may have bought the product/company afterwards or subcontracted the development. That's before even considering that they may only provide "user support" which can be of little use if you actually need "sysadmin support" (but don't actually use the program at all.)
I know my GUI tools for administering a Windows server and I can typically make complex adjustments just as fast on it as my UNIX buddy can do using command line tools on his Linux boxes.
Interestingly Windows now has a CLI, in the form of "PowerShell". Though AFAIK there isn't, yet, the equivalent of SSH for Windows. There are also some things in Windows you can't alter via a GUI anyway.
A 500 micron thick liver isn't going to process much alcohol.Sounds even less impressive when you call it half a mm thick:) Of course this thin you'd never have anything which could be usefully transplanted into a human.
While I'd like to switch over to more LEDs, every LED bulb I have purchased so far has had manufacturer instructions that they should NOT be mounted in an enclosed fixture (such as a ceiling dome). So what are the millions of people supposed to do when these fixtures, which basically only allow incandescents, have no suitable replacements? Same applies for certain types of recessed lighting - CFLs and LEDs are not allowed in some fixtures.
Another problem is where the replacement lamp simply won't physically fit. Having to replace the entire fixture, especially if it has multiple lamps, costs time and money.
What does this have to do with a machine having a GPU? You can equip a machine with a GPU and not hook a monitor to it - still works for processing just fine...
You can with a physical machine. How do you propose to do so with a Virtual Machine?
Bitlocker is a Microsoft product. It has backdoors.
Historically propriatary software tends to be rather poor when it comes to cryptography. Cryptography is hard to get right, since even apparently trivial changes can have huge effects on the security of the code. Any requirement for "backdoors" is likely to make things even harder.
Encryption is not a one size fits all solution. I can say that I use encryption for everything because my HDDs use FDE (BitLocker, FileVault, and LUKS.) However, encrypting everything that hits the platters doesn't give any protection against remote attack.
Note that "cloud storage" along with "file sharing" can be a method of defeating filesystem encryption. Especially if the communication is itself encrypted so you can't easily tell what is being synchronised/shared.
There is another approach.... start detaining or "making disappear"; everyone Snowden had contact with; all his potential friends or accomplices / other people he is known to have dealt with --- and interrogate them all deeply, until someone reveals information about this doomesday system.
Or until doing this triggers the release of the data. How can you know that a "dead man's switch" isn't "booby trapped" in some way beforehand?
CONTENT PROVIDERS: MAKE YOUR DAMN MOVIES AVAILABLE.
Let me add, at reasonable prices and conveniently. No, a $30 BlueRay containing lots of crap I am not interested in, and that I can't skip, is not a reasonable price and it is not convenient.
In terms of price and convenience that isn't actually too bad. If it can only be bought for that (even any price) thousands of miles away then there is a cost and time penalty. Potentially a very big one if the only option is to go there in person.
Keeping movies unavailable for years, only to bring them out again for short periods of time and at exorbitant prices is not a reasonable price and is not convenient. Making them available for streaming for short periods of time, only to yank them without warning is not convenient.
Often also with all sorts of silly geographic restrictions in addition.
If one is going to do a risk management assessment properly, one must enumerate the risks, enumerate the benefits, enumerate the costs, figure the impact of any mitigation and figure the probability of the event in the first place (and this list is just off the top of my head - I'm sure there's a couple more that I am forgetting).
A proper risk management process is iterative including assessing the risks/benefits of proposed "mitigation". This is something often overlooked especially by the "do something" political contingent.
Terrorism IS NOT a imagined problem - there are several buildings missing from NYC and several large passenger planes destroyed just from 9/11.
Even the 9/11 attacks rate as minor in terms of preventable causes of death. It's quite possible that people switching to more dangerous forms of transport, such as driving, has killed many more Americans than these attacks. That's before even considering those killed in the name of the "War on Terror".
When "doing something" means you are forcing the poor of the world to live with the cost of higher energy prices (ie, higher food costs), one really has to question the motivation of the ones proposing these ideas (and if you don't think this is a the case, just look at what the production of ethanol and the diversion of corn to make this "green" fuel have caused).
It gets even dafter when some forms of "green" energy turn out to have a similar, even higher, "carbon footprint" in comparison with whatever they are ment to replace.
Yet we pump billions into the defense against terrorism, but we keep bickering on whether or not Global Warming may or may not happen. Anyone able to explain the sense in that?
The comparison stilll holds. Huge quanities of money are also pumped into AGW. With, at best, showing as much benefit as the billions spent of a minority of terrorrism. (In the case of the "War on Terror" the US Government has has never cutoff it's own sponsorship of terrorists. Or even taken on board that the average terrorist within the US is most likely to be motivated by anti-abortion or animal rights.)
The price of living in a free society is that occasionally someone is going to get pissed off at the world and blow up spectators at a marathon or take a gun to a classroom of kiddies. It would be great if we could stop this, but if the only way of stopping it is to take away your freedom and allow the government to spy on its people then maybe the price is too high.
Assuming that such things would actually be effective in the first place. Even if they were that they wouldn't put the public at greater risk from rogue "law enforcement".
Terrorists aim to inspire terror. That's what they do.
This is something often missed. A bomb threat can be a very effective terror tactic. Even for a terrorist group without the ability to actually build a working bomb. Causing such sensors to falsely trigger would be a variation on the theme of "SWATting".
I was thinking very much this. You don't even need to use a septic tank: all you need is that it never reaches the sewer system. Just get it into some kind of barrel or tank, bury it if you so desire (at your house or somewhere else) and continue as planned.
Or more usefully someone else's house. If the intention is for a car/truck bomb any waste products can probably go in the vehicle too.
First they'll put a probe in each neighborhood. Then they'll put a probe in the sewer for each street. Then they'll put a probe in the individual drains from every house. Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
What's to stop someone else pouring something nasty down YOUR drain though?
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Could you please explain why the customer should expect the store to not honor the $100 price? Because I would probably look at it and think "huh, I guess it was one of those 'add to cart to see the real price" items."
Or it's a "loss leader" where you might expect "sorry out of stock" should you attempt to actually buy one.
So, I guess the whole thing comes down to: When is an online order 'complete'? When they say 'thanks for your order', and email you a confirmation? (That's what I'd say.) Or when they actually ship? Or when you get the order delivered?
It's complete when the "law of the land" says it is complete. Which varies. Further complicted by it being very easy for buyer and seller to be in different legal jurisdictions. Even for the "seller" to be in multiple jurisdictions.
The retailer is under no obligation to supply the goods at a price they did not offer and agree to
Except that they may well have offered and agreed to that price.It depends exactly how the applicable laws define this process. The "advertised price" may or not be relevent.
The retailer doesn't receive money immediately when your credit card is "charged" ('authorized for payment') -- the charge action, is a pre-authorization to receive a certain amount of money.
The retailer doesn't receive any money until settlement; usually around 30 days after the CC charge, before settled funds can be deposited in the retailer's accounts.
In the past it could take a long time for cheques to "clear" or even be "banked". Similarly when credit/debit card transactions involved carbon papers. But in many places the law was, and quite possibly still is, that the handing over of such documents indicated the time of payment.
If the online store goes ahead with the sale, then they have accepted the error. Once they ship the goods, it is now too late for them to back out of the deal, and escape without causing the customer undue harm.
Depending on the applicable laws accepting the money may have created a binding contract on the store to supply the goods.
The obvious complication is if the applicable law is where the customer is; where the store is (either their registered office or where they actually ship from); where the server used physically is or where the URL implies it is.
They only have to honour it (at least in the UK) when they send a confirmation order to your email as a receipt and take payment.
This hasn't stopped cases of online retailers doing things like cancelling orders after the fact. In some cases after money has been transfered by banks. Just because they can do so.
The contract is made when money passes hands and you get your receipt,
A "receipt" dosn't have to be an email. It possibly isn't even necessary at all if you other proof of the seller accepting the money.
until then they can advertise the prices as what they want as much as they want.
The advertised price in the UK has the definition of "an invitation to treat". A starting point for negotiations. The price you pay is that you have negotiated with the seller. Which need not be the advertised price. Even though the "checkout" part of a web store is a machine. The essential steps of "I'd like X of Y"; That'll be £Z, how do you want to pay?"; "Forget it/I'll pay in this way..." are still there.
Then they should only accept as many orders as they have stock. That at least limits the damage to what they have on-hand. just like brick-n-mortar stores.
In many places a "brick-n-mortar store" would be breaking the law if they took money from customers for goods they couldn't supply. Why should a "web store" be viewed differently?
If anything a machine should be more able to keep track of orders and stock levels than several people...
In fact, the laws in some states demand that brick and mortar stores to honor the prices that they advertive. This includes prices that are in error!
In other places what matters, in law, is when the customer and vendor have agreed on a price and the customer has paid then the transaction is concluded. Since "vending machines" have been around for thousands of years, in one form or other, using one would not make any difference unless there is a specific law to say so. Similarly non cash based forms of money are not new. With most of the relevent laws probably dating from times where banking records could be days/weeks behind. But a customer would still have been considered to have paid even if their cheque/check wasn't banked until the end of the week/month then took days before their bank even saw it.
Having the source allows us to debug misbehaving software (runnin g strace/ltrace/dtrace and compare the output to the source), it allows us to patch bugs or patch to add new features, it allows us to back-port newer software and recompile software against different library versions.
Many of these can potentially go against a vendors interests. Since then it's you rather than them (or their marketing department) decide what is a "bug" and what is a "feature". Also they may want to be able to sell you new versions of the software. Regardless of if the older version better fits the needs of you and/or your users.
It is when intractable problems crop up. Often, a quick glance at the source gives more insight into what's going on than calling vendor support, as well as saves a lot of time.
Very often vendor "support" can have little or no access to the actual code (or anyone who had any part in writing it). They may have bought the product/company afterwards or subcontracted the development. That's before even considering that they may only provide "user support" which can be of little use if you actually need "sysadmin support" (but don't actually use the program at all.)
I know my GUI tools for administering a Windows server and I can typically make complex adjustments just as fast on it as my UNIX buddy can do using command line tools on his Linux boxes.
Interestingly Windows now has a CLI, in the form of "PowerShell". Though AFAIK there isn't, yet, the equivalent of SSH for Windows. There are also some things in Windows you can't alter via a GUI anyway.
A 500 micron thick liver isn't going to process much alcohol.Sounds even less impressive when you call it half a mm thick :) Of course this thin you'd never have anything which could be usefully transplanted into a human.
While I'd like to switch over to more LEDs, every LED bulb I have purchased so far has had manufacturer instructions that they should NOT be mounted in an enclosed fixture (such as a ceiling dome). So what are the millions of people supposed to do when these fixtures, which basically only allow incandescents, have no suitable replacements? Same applies for certain types of recessed lighting - CFLs and LEDs are not allowed in some fixtures.
Another problem is where the replacement lamp simply won't physically fit. Having to replace the entire fixture, especially if it has multiple lamps, costs time and money.
What does this have to do with a machine having a GPU? You can equip a machine with a GPU and not hook a monitor to it - still works for processing just fine...
You can with a physical machine. How do you propose to do so with a Virtual Machine?
When a corporation is executed for causing the deaths of real people, then we might talk about corporate personhood.
Or where one is arrested and held in a jail prior to a trial.
Bitlocker is a Microsoft product. It has backdoors.
Historically propriatary software tends to be rather poor when it comes to cryptography. Cryptography is hard to get right, since even apparently trivial changes can have huge effects on the security of the code. Any requirement for "backdoors" is likely to make things even harder.
Encryption is not a one size fits all solution. I can say that I use encryption for everything because my HDDs use FDE (BitLocker, FileVault, and LUKS.) However, encrypting everything that hits the platters doesn't give any protection against remote attack.
Note that "cloud storage" along with "file sharing" can be a method of defeating filesystem encryption. Especially if the communication is itself encrypted so you can't easily tell what is being synchronised/shared.
so they encrypt it, giving people a false sense of security, while they give the decryption key to the NSA...
Or the NSA has checked the software to ensure that they already know/don't need that key.
There is another approach.... start detaining or "making disappear"; everyone Snowden had contact with; all his potential friends or accomplices / other people he is known to have dealt with --- and interrogate them all deeply, until someone reveals information about this doomesday system.
Or until doing this triggers the release of the data. How can you know that a "dead man's switch" isn't "booby trapped" in some way beforehand?
CONTENT PROVIDERS: MAKE YOUR DAMN MOVIES AVAILABLE.
Let me add, at reasonable prices and conveniently. No, a $30 BlueRay containing lots of crap I am not interested in, and that I can't skip, is not a reasonable price and it is not convenient.
In terms of price and convenience that isn't actually too bad. If it can only be bought for that (even any price) thousands of miles away then there is a cost and time penalty. Potentially a very big one if the only option is to go there in person.
Keeping movies unavailable for years, only to bring them out again for short periods of time and at exorbitant prices is not a reasonable price and is not convenient. Making them available for streaming for short periods of time, only to yank them without warning is not convenient.
Often also with all sorts of silly geographic restrictions in addition.
If one is going to do a risk management assessment properly, one must enumerate the risks, enumerate the benefits, enumerate the costs, figure the impact of any mitigation and figure the probability of the event in the first place (and this list is just off the top of my head - I'm sure there's a couple more that I am forgetting).
A proper risk management process is iterative including assessing the risks/benefits of proposed "mitigation". This is something often overlooked especially by the "do something" political contingent.
Terrorism IS NOT a imagined problem - there are several buildings missing from NYC and several large passenger planes destroyed just from 9/11.
Even the 9/11 attacks rate as minor in terms of preventable causes of death. It's quite possible that people switching to more dangerous forms of transport, such as driving, has killed many more Americans than these attacks. That's before even considering those killed in the name of the "War on Terror".
When "doing something" means you are forcing the poor of the world to live with the cost of higher energy prices (ie, higher food costs), one really has to question the motivation of the ones proposing these ideas (and if you don't think this is a the case, just look at what the production of ethanol and the diversion of corn to make this "green" fuel have caused).
It gets even dafter when some forms of "green" energy turn out to have a similar, even higher, "carbon footprint" in comparison with whatever they are ment to replace.
Yet we pump billions into the defense against terrorism, but we keep bickering on whether or not Global Warming may or may not happen. Anyone able to explain the sense in that?
The comparison stilll holds. Huge quanities of money are also pumped into AGW. With, at best, showing as much benefit as the billions spent of a minority of terrorrism. (In the case of the "War on Terror" the US Government has has never cutoff it's own sponsorship of terrorists. Or even taken on board that the average terrorist within the US is most likely to be motivated by anti-abortion or animal rights.)
because they broke almost all of their pre-election promises.
When was the last time a political party (or even an individual politician) did anything else?
The price of living in a free society is that occasionally someone is going to get pissed off at the world and blow up spectators at a marathon or take a gun to a classroom of kiddies. It would be great if we could stop this, but if the only way of stopping it is to take away your freedom and allow the government to spy on its people then maybe the price is too high.
Assuming that such things would actually be effective in the first place. Even if they were that they wouldn't put the public at greater risk from rogue "law enforcement".
Terrorists aim to inspire terror. That's what they do.
This is something often missed. A bomb threat can be a very effective terror tactic. Even for a terrorist group without the ability to actually build a working bomb.
Causing such sensors to falsely trigger would be a variation on the theme of "SWATting".
I was thinking very much this. You don't even need to use a septic tank: all you need is that it never reaches the sewer system. Just get it into some kind of barrel or tank, bury it if you so desire (at your house or somewhere else) and continue as planned.
Or more usefully someone else's house. If the intention is for a car/truck bomb any waste products can probably go in the vehicle too.
First they'll put a probe in each neighborhood. Then they'll put a probe in the sewer for each street. Then they'll put a probe in the individual drains from every house. Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
What's to stop someone else pouring something nasty down YOUR drain though?