I don't trust any scientists. I have a PhD in applied science, and am fully capable of reviewing the data myself, which I have been doing for over 20 years. I believe and trust hard facts, and have a very low opinion of climate "scientists" who have been shilling for grant money and wildly wrong for the last 20 plus years with their computer models and predictions, http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp... AGW "scientists" have been caught repeatedly faking numbers, http://www.washingtontimes.com... and even they will agree that the science is far from settled (the only people arguing that the science is settled and all scientists believe in AGW are Bill Nye and the idiot politicians and those who worship at their feet). Further, your assertion that being right that the temperature is going up somehow validates the AGW "scientists" is ludicrous. Is it rational, as the AGW "scientists" argue, to destroy our civilization, and kill millions of people (even unintentionally, they are still dead, and rolling back civilization in favor of nature always costs lives, just ask the 45 million Africans who have died of Malaria to "save the birds" after we stopped using DDT http://www.discoverthenetworks...http://www.who.int/malaria/med... )
If the global temperature will rise another 0.3C in the next 100 years before falling 2C in the following 500 years is it in any way rational to divert funds from the most efficient and economical solutions to problems like energy, transportation, heating and AC? I will answer for you: No, it is not. Is there any moral, legal or rational justification for redistributing by force natural resources or money to countries more affected by global warming if AGW is not real? No there is not. There are some very key results if AGW is real or not that come into play.
Scientific fact says CO2 levels pre-industrial revolution were measured between 250 and 550 PPM. Therefore, our measurements today do not indicate much, if any, change in CO2 concentrations globally. The simplest and most reasonable explanation is that plant growth is limited primarily by CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and that is where all the CO2 has been going as we produce it. This theory has been thoroughly tested and proven scientifically (if you increase CO2 concentrations locally, keeping other factors constant, plant growth is more rapid, more dense and the overall carbon capture rate increases.) This is scientific fact, not pull it out of your ass speculation.
Furthermore, hard science says that the earth's atmosphere is already 100% opaque in the 3 IR bands that CO2 absorbs. Thus, arguing more CO2 in the atmosphere contributes to global warming is wild speculation at best and at worst irrational/disingenuous.
Unlike your (incorrect) assertions, I do not follow others, I have and will continue to evaluate the evidence myself. I am happy to make a prediction for you: The climate will change. It will be either hotter or cooler than it is today. Glaciers will either grow or shrink. Sea levels will either rise or fall. The one constant that we know is that the climate is never constant. To assert that what we see today is atypical and caused by humans based on the last 300 years of observation is irrational and completely ignores the facts at hand. https://static.skepticalscienc...
And they had to do it because laws in nearly all US states will heavily fine or even charge companies with fraud if they do not honor their posted prices/advertisements.
No, the article doesn't go into details more that saying that it was a "flaw" in the gift card system, so you can't say that it was a security vulnerability. It may well have been a logic flaw in how gift cards are processed, and if so, that is not hacking and not a crime, no mater how hard Lowes and the ADA might wish otherwise.
And if the gift card system was broken internally by Lowes, as long as the couple legally owned the gift card, it is still not stealing or hacking or computer fraud. What they did may not be ethical, but it was not criminal as far as we know right now.
Should they have told Lowes? Probably.
Should they get to keep the stuff that Lowes shipped to them in error? Not in that case.
Should they get prosecuted for fraud or theft? Um no. Not unless they created the bug or colluded with an employee to create the bug or a fraudulent unlimited gift card.
If they are stupid or get a bad lawyer, they will be frightened by the ADA's massive overreach and take a plea deal with several years of probation and community service. If they are smart and/or get a good attorney, they will get the case thrown out, sanction the ADA and counter sue Lowes and publicize how Lowes is trying to get the family torn apart and the parents thrown in jail for an error that Lowes made on their website. After that makes it on the national news, Lowes will be throwing cash at them to shut up and go away as the American people hate corporations shitting on the little guy to cover up a mistake made by the corporation which is essentially what this is.
The difference from the example that you cite (someone walking out of the store with unpaid merchandise) is flawed. There is active theft on the part of the person via walking past the registers, past the security measures with a product for which money is requested in exchange.
What happened with this couple is much more similar to a pricing error or items ringing up at $0. Most states have laws that not only protect the consumer in that situation, but they require the merchant to let them keep the merchandise on penalty of fines and criminal charges of fraud towards the merchant. It is irrelevant how many times it happens before the merchant catches it, it is fully the merchant's responsibility to ensure proper pricing and billing.
Those charges will very likely be dropped, and I will expect a judge to sanction the ADA that brought them along with a counter suit against Lowes for harassment, pain and suffering, fraudulent prosecution, etc. as those laws don't discriminate between brick and mortar and online stores. Unless they have withheld a lot of detail about real, actual hacking (back end/front end manipulation by non standard software/something other than an OTS web browser, etc.)
Any decent lawyer will get this thrown out in 5 minutes and get the ADA who brought the charges sanctioned for overcharging and incompetence. The fact that the article did not describe how they did it likely indicates it was a flaw in the gift card processing code on Lowes end (i.e. exactly using up a gift card's balance resulted in the card remaining fully charged). If there was no code manipulation, intrusion or abnormal software used on the client side, this entire case falls apart.
The couple will not get to keep the merchandise because it was sent to them due to computer error on the part of Lowes, but the problem was apparently not on their end, it was on Lowes. A good attorney would probably also file a civil suit for a few hundred thousand in damages due to negligence on the part of Lowes because Lowes chose to pursue charges against the couple instead of apologizing to the couple for their mistake as the took back the merchandise. We will have to see when more facts come to light.
Bottom line, there is no substitute for good code, and good software engineers are worth their weight in gold, especially in this day and age. Lowes will probably end up spending north of $500K on this mess, assuming they don't get sued by the couple. That could easily double if they get sued. Thee error was probably in less than 2 lines of code.
Honestly I need more details than this to know if it was stealing or not. If I find an item on Amazon or some other online marketplace that shows up in the cart for $0.00 and I put it in my cart and "buy" it, does that make me a thief? If I walk into a brick and mortar store and I buy something that rings up for $0, and then go back and "buy out" the store of their free item, does that make it theft?
If I were to take the UPC from the "free" item and affix it to something else, now that would clearly be stealing, but it just depends on whose fault it is for making something free, IMHO.
The business has the right to charge what they want for items, and it is not up to the consumer to pay for something the business is giving away. In many states, laws specifically state that if you incorrectly price an item either in an advert or on store shelves, the business must honor the transaction or they can be in big legal trouble...
He will be charged, plead guilty, sit in jail for a week and be quietly traded to Russia for some poor bastard US citizen or diplomat that the FSB scoops off the street in Moscow. He knows this and would rather not draw out the process...
I bought one of those shareware licenses back around 1999 and I still run 5.666 almost daily. It is a great media player and is far superior to iTunes for listening to and managing music.
There is again a difference between having a constitution in theory and in practice. You are extremely naive if you think there is equivalence between the NSA and the FSB. As far as I am aware, the US hasn't spontaneously invaded any neutral countries recently, or mounted massive cyber attacks against said countries, shot down commercial airliners etc...
Having a constitution in theory and having a constitution in practice are two very different things. I suggest you educate yourself on the actual political state of Russia. You are dangerously naive if you think there is any equivalence between the FBI and the FSB.
" we do not sell or share your personally identifiable statistics"
So OK, unless the company signs a binding agreement with it's customers, in 6 months when the numbers are down they can decide to turn around and sell the data they have collected on you and you can't do a damn thing about it. Or in 2 years when a new CEO comes in and wants to boost profits to get a better bonus so they can buy the 52 foot yacht instead of the 35 footer, they can turn around and sell it. The bottom line is if the information gets collected, sooner or later it will get sold. The only way to really prevent this is for the company to destroy the data after a set time long enough to be used for their internal purposes, but short enough to prevent a money grab down the road.
Maybe the question to ask Kaspersky is what exactly would an inappropriate relationship with the FSB look like according to them? It seems like there is some pretty damning evidence that a bad actor state (Russia) has been working closely with Kaspersky in a way that violates the expectation of most of the free world. If Kaspersky is serious about clearing it's name, it should clearly define and limit it's relationship with the FSB and the Russian government. Unfortunately for Kaspersky, being based in Russia, a country without a constitution or bill of rights limits what they can actually back up with action, unless they shift the bulk of their organization out of Russia, and I don't see that happening.
I am not even going to get into discussing CO2 with you. You clearly know the AGW arguments but have no background in hard science and thus no filter to determine valid science vs. pull it out their ass speculation/junk science. You are worried that we are turning into Venus huh? You do know that Venus receives more intense solar radiation than earth, plus Venus atmosphere is 97% plus CO2 (970,000 PPM), whereas on earth we are at 400PPM (or 0.04%). No, plants and animals both respriate and produce CO2, plants also happen to convert more CO2 than they use, and no, all biomass on earth do not exist in the margins. There is an active carbon cycle where plant growth is limited by the availability of CO2 (~98% of plant mass is built out of CO2 and H2O, the remaining 2% is minerals).
Regarding the ACA, if the Democrats wanted to make health care better, they should have gotten involved instead of sitting on their hands and trying to obstruct. They voted lock stock and barrel for the ACA and it is broken as hell. The Dims are putting their politics ahead of the people, and it will cost them dearly in the midterms, then the ACA will get repealed and we will get market reforms, HSAs and a lot of other common sense solutions to lower the costs of health care for everyone. Couple that with the booming job growth and most people will be able to buy the health insurance that is right for them (or join a health care cost sharing co-op). The only difference is we have to suffer through another 18 months of the ACA imploding.
Regarding education spending: Privatizing schools would solve virtually all the problems via competition. (Competition provides virtually everything else in your life of quality, you might think on that for a minute.) Dumb kids and kids with crappy parents would still be dumb and would wind up in trade schools doing manual labor (vouchers would work there too), but smart kids would be able to excel and compete globally. We already use what is essentially a voucher system for the university system and the world has not come to an end, in fact US universities are well respected around the world. The only people who don't want to see school vouchers happen are the bad/ignorant teachers and the teachers union and Dim politicians who get a huge chunk of their funds from the union through mandatory dues. Parents would love vouchers. There is zero evidence that competition would make schools worse and mountains of evidence that it would make schools better.
Regarding criminals: GTFO. Crime rates are at historic lows in large part to 3 strikes laws taking habitual criminals out of circulation. That you believe anyone wants people to be incarcerated for financial gain is pitiful (you need to pull your head out of whatever liberal echo chamber you have been living in). You need to accept that criminality is not an accident and criminals need to be removed from society (150 years ago, we used to hang most criminals and the world was better for it and society didn't have to pay 7% of all their tax funds to house evil people who chose to break the laws of the land, often injuring innocents in the process).
Regarding welfare: So please tell me what should be taxed to discourage all the people taking welfare and other entitlements? The reality is that people will always take free stuff as long as you offer it. The reason for the explosion of welfare under Obama is equal parts job destruction via ACA and regulations as well as the elimination of the legal requirement to be gainfully employed, in school or looking for work.
Regarding farmers: So according to you all farmers grow corn for high fructose corn syrup which is as addictive as Cocaine? (Food is addictive, once you start you don't stop eating it until you die). High fructose corn syrup is no
Pretty sure there are records of Trump paying millions in taxes. You need to cite something with actual facts before you try to pull that BS.
People on welfare and below the poverty line can have a net effective income in benefits of up to $45,000/year and pay zero taxes:
No income tax: Welfare and income below ~$40k(?) is not taxed, nor do they have to pay SSI/SDI No property tax: Those who receive subsidized government housing pay no property tax No Sales tax: Those on food stamps don't pay sales tax on food No road tax: Those receiving free bus and train cards don't pay road taxes No phone tax: Those with free "Obama" cell phones/plans don't pay phone tax
Check either the labor participation rate or the U-6 number. At this point in time you just look foolish trying to say Obama had 5% unemployment. That the media were his accomplices in lying about the unemployment rate is no excuse after 8 years... If unemployment were really that low, wages would not have dropped by something like $4500 per year on average during Obama's tenure. A tight labor market causes wages to go up, not down.
You need some citations that contain actual statistics for your "facts". The green jobs lie was just that, a lie. Coal jobs were lost because Obama essentially banned coal fired power plants via regulations making them cost negative to operate. Not even gassfied coal plants could operate at a profit.
No one is complaining about clean air and clean water, but when you start treating a key atmospheric component that is essentially plant food (CO2) as a pollutant without real science (screaming and stomping your foot, claiming majority rule in science, and/or claiming the science is "over" are not valid science, but rather logical fallacies committed by those with weak arguments that lack hard science to back up their claims) that is a real problem for industry.
CO2 is produced by every living organism, and plants need it to live. It has historically been at higher levels pre industrial revolution, http://drtimball.com/2012/pre-... it already blocks all the IR bands at 100%, and adding more will not change that (don't try to feed me that speculative BS about upper vs lower atmospheric diffraction, that is pure speculative BS with zero science to back it up), but somehow we are teetering on the apocalypse, never mind the science and historical evidence.
"The poor pay zero taxes because their pay hasn't increased for the last 40 years while the value of their income has decreased for the last 40 years which has caused them to fall below the poverty line. Yes, for some reason, you can have a full time job and still be impoverished because assholes aren't paying you what you are really worth."
Actually, that is a lie. If you look at stratification of poor who are working (i.e. not on welfare) before Obama, ~65% stayed below the poverty line an average of 8 years or less, meaning with hard work they were able to enter the middle class. There are some working poor with either mental or psychological defects that prevent them from ever moving out of poverty, but that is just a fact of life and has always been the case since time immemorial. The welfare class and working poor exploded under Obama because he paid off campaign contributors using the stimulus package instead of shoring up the housing market, and he allowed massive illegal immigration, rubber stamp H1B immigration all while his policies destroyed millions of jobs. All that works together to create a glut of unskilled and skilled labor while simultaneously reducing the number of available jobs. Stack the socialistic redistribution of wealth through Obamacare, mainly borne out by the middle class and he got a long way to destroying the main voting block of the conservatives: the middle class. This is how you get the 27 year old Millennials living in their parents basement who have a college degree and other marketable skills but can't get a job.
As far as the ACA goes, the Repubicans only got 90% consensus in their own party, while not a single democrat voted for the repeal/replace, so Republicans have decided to let the ACA explode (which it is) and let the Dims ride that sinking ship into oblivion in the next election. The ACA has a few good ideas mixed in with an implementation designed to create more dependency, not reduce the cost of health care. It has already cost the US economy $100s of billions of dollars more than projected, and the markets are collapsing across the country. For those who actually buy their insurance, it has jacked up rates between 50% and 200% while at the same time increasing co pay and deductibles 300% to 1000%. That is an abject failure at containing costs if you pay for your insurance. If you are a freeloader with lots of medical problems, it is great for you, but that is only because the ACA is stealing from others to pay for your coverage, and that is unsustainable.
"Yeah, who needs the police, firefighters, hospitals, schools or any of that shit, right?
Since Google has changed it's policy from "do no evil" to "do the right (alt-left) thing", the purging of James Damore for a well written, thoughtful document that challenged the alt-left ethos https://medium.com/@Cernovich/... was the last straw for me. I have switched away from Google as my default search engine, removed the Chrome browser from my PC and directed all meaningful email away from my Gmail account. I have also switched from ABP to a pi-hole to deny all ad revenue to the leaches.
Google used to be a great tech company, but it is clear that they are no longer interested in science or the truth if it contradicts their worldview and are only secondarily interested in innovation. For a company through which the vast majority of the information in the world is filtered, that is a very bad thing. They are no longer interested in the most accurate results, they are interested in the right results, whatever they might determine that might be. They were already caught interfering with the autocomplete suggestions when searching for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections. I suspect that they will continue to dramatically lose market share until they get a CEO who cleans house of all the SJW types in positions of power and gets back to focusing on the core technology.
"most movies are rubbish, no matter how they try to package them or how much or how little they charge for them, and given the incredibly easy access we now have to all sorts of media and entertainment, the theaters are on borrowed time."
Exactly right, and the reason most are rubbish is because rather than focusing on telling a good story, something like 95% of all Hollywood movies are about virtue signaling their alt-left friends in Hollywood and proselytizing their world view. Think about it. When was the last time that you saw an action movie where the villain wasn't a white male corporate type (movies based on comic books and other pre-existing works don't count). Hell, they even changed the Mandarin to be a white male business type. When was the last time you saw a really good, emotionally gripping story with well developed characters and a coherent plot? Don't tell me it can't be done, because in the 1950s and 1960s Hollywood was cranking out dozens of this type of movie in something like 6 weeks, whereas now it takes them 2-3 years and you walk out of the theater shocked at the one dimensional characters, lack of character development, incoherent plot, etc...
I don't think it is even 6 months at this point, unless it is a Disney movie, it seems like 3 months from screen release to home theater release (usually digital on iTunes first, then disc release a couple of weeks later).
This exactly. They have slowly DRM'd themselves out of the DVD/BluRay business by charging $18 for a DVD or $25 for a BluRay and format locking it while services like Netflix and premium Hulu have tons of content to chose from. Want to stream your DVD to your tablet? Sorry, you can't. You need to hit up a digital service like iTunes and pay yet again for the pleasure unless you bought multi-format from the get go. Hell, I have VHS/DVD movies from years ago before online streaming was even a thing, but the MPAA thinks I should be forced to pay again for a digital copy? Why exactly? I only bought a license according to the MPAA, my SD license should be valid in perpetuity. There was no expiration date on my movie.
Technology changes markets and companies either adapt or get left behind. 30 years ago, encyclopedias were a thriving industry, today, those products no longer exist due to the innovation of the internet. In the same vein, consumers have spoken, and as the Luddites die out, the next generation will consume all of it's media on demand, commercial free in the comfort of wherever they want to view it from for a nominal fee (not $50 BTW, that is pure fantasy). Companies can adapt, or they can go bankrupt. There will still be niche markets, but they will be just that.
Or, alternatively, this is what happens when you destroy the job market like Obama did for the last 8 years with massive new regulation and Obamacare while simultaneously trying to buy votes by eliminating the work requirement for welfare recipients and massively expanding entitlement programs... The rich already pay 80% of all tax in the US http://www.newsmax.com/Finance... while the "poor" 45% Democrat voting block who thinks the rich don't pay enough pay ZERO taxes but enjoy all the general benefits as well as free healthcare, free housing, free food, free phones... the list goes on. http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
That said, the federal government as well as most states mentioned don't have an income problem, they have a spending problem.
"Right now, Ericsson is hiring engineers to repair the damage that earlier saving packages caused. It's crucial that most of all the Swedish R&D department remains somewhat protected. They are the ones who will come up with the new solutions that will drive sales in the long term,"
In other words, the last CEO was a typical MBA jackass who cut engineering/R&D as a short term cost savings measure, and now they are paying a huge price (~25% layoff based on 100k employees). It never ceases to amaze me how many CEOs view R&D as overhead, and cut those employees willy nilly and then laugh all the way to the bank when they pull the ripcord on their golden parachute in 5 years as the company tanks because they don't have any products to compete because they starved their pipeline to fatten the C-level executive bonuses. (A karmic law that will never be passed would be for management bonuses to be impounded for 5 years and distributed to any employees laid off for 5 years after the bonus is paid.)
The root cause of all this stupid is the practice of paying CEOs more than god in salary and bonuses for what amounts to a relatively simple job (look at the market, competition, position and guess where to go/what to do next). Regardless of what the CEOs might say, most larger, established companies would probably do better being guided by a simple algorithm that looks at maybe 15 key factors and then decides if the company should expand, how many new products to pursue etc. and then let market research and engineering feasiblity studies guide what products are selected using a Pugh study.
CEOs are fast becoming the emperor with no clothes and are in the same category as fund managers (hint: you are better off with an index fund, since fund managers are about as good as throwing darts at a wall). Companies need to come up with a similar, stable form of governance to an index fund.
Most real work is done by lower management, HR, sales, sales research, etc. "Vision" might be marketed by CEOs as some ineffable thing, but most companies would do a lot better long term hiring someone internally for $300k/year who knows WTF the company is in the business of doing.
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I don't trust any scientists. I have a PhD in applied science, and am fully capable of reviewing the data myself, which I have been doing for over 20 years. I believe and trust hard facts, and have a very low opinion of climate "scientists" who have been shilling for grant money and wildly wrong for the last 20 plus years with their computer models and predictions, http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp... AGW "scientists" have been caught repeatedly faking numbers, http://www.washingtontimes.com... and even they will agree that the science is far from settled (the only people arguing that the science is settled and all scientists believe in AGW are Bill Nye and the idiot politicians and those who worship at their feet). Further, your assertion that being right that the temperature is going up somehow validates the AGW "scientists" is ludicrous. Is it rational, as the AGW "scientists" argue, to destroy our civilization, and kill millions of people (even unintentionally, they are still dead, and rolling back civilization in favor of nature always costs lives, just ask the 45 million Africans who have died of Malaria to "save the birds" after we stopped using DDT http://www.discoverthenetworks... http://www.who.int/malaria/med... )
If the global temperature will rise another 0.3C in the next 100 years before falling 2C in the following 500 years is it in any way rational to divert funds from the most efficient and economical solutions to problems like energy, transportation, heating and AC? I will answer for you: No, it is not. Is there any moral, legal or rational justification for redistributing by force natural resources or money to countries more affected by global warming if AGW is not real? No there is not. There are some very key results if AGW is real or not that come into play.
Scientific fact says CO2 levels pre-industrial revolution were measured between 250 and 550 PPM. Therefore, our measurements today do not indicate much, if any, change in CO2 concentrations globally. The simplest and most reasonable explanation is that plant growth is limited primarily by CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and that is where all the CO2 has been going as we produce it. This theory has been thoroughly tested and proven scientifically (if you increase CO2 concentrations locally, keeping other factors constant, plant growth is more rapid, more dense and the overall carbon capture rate increases.) This is scientific fact, not pull it out of your ass speculation.
Furthermore, hard science says that the earth's atmosphere is already 100% opaque in the 3 IR bands that CO2 absorbs. Thus, arguing more CO2 in the atmosphere contributes to global warming is wild speculation at best and at worst irrational/disingenuous.
Unlike your (incorrect) assertions, I do not follow others, I have and will continue to evaluate the evidence myself. I am happy to make a prediction for you: The climate will change. It will be either hotter or cooler than it is today. Glaciers will either grow or shrink. Sea levels will either rise or fall. The one constant that we know is that the climate is never constant. To assert that what we see today is atypical and caused by humans based on the last 300 years of observation is irrational and completely ignores the facts at hand. https://static.skepticalscienc...
And they had to do it because laws in nearly all US states will heavily fine or even charge companies with fraud if they do not honor their posted prices/advertisements.
No, the article doesn't go into details more that saying that it was a "flaw" in the gift card system, so you can't say that it was a security vulnerability. It may well have been a logic flaw in how gift cards are processed, and if so, that is not hacking and not a crime, no mater how hard Lowes and the ADA might wish otherwise.
And if the gift card system was broken internally by Lowes, as long as the couple legally owned the gift card, it is still not stealing or hacking or computer fraud. What they did may not be ethical, but it was not criminal as far as we know right now.
Should they have told Lowes? Probably.
Should they get to keep the stuff that Lowes shipped to them in error? Not in that case.
Should they get prosecuted for fraud or theft? Um no. Not unless they created the bug or colluded with an employee to create the bug or a fraudulent unlimited gift card.
If they are stupid or get a bad lawyer, they will be frightened by the ADA's massive overreach and take a plea deal with several years of probation and community service. If they are smart and/or get a good attorney, they will get the case thrown out, sanction the ADA and counter sue Lowes and publicize how Lowes is trying to get the family torn apart and the parents thrown in jail for an error that Lowes made on their website. After that makes it on the national news, Lowes will be throwing cash at them to shut up and go away as the American people hate corporations shitting on the little guy to cover up a mistake made by the corporation which is essentially what this is.
The difference from the example that you cite (someone walking out of the store with unpaid merchandise) is flawed. There is active theft on the part of the person via walking past the registers, past the security measures with a product for which money is requested in exchange.
What happened with this couple is much more similar to a pricing error or items ringing up at $0. Most states have laws that not only protect the consumer in that situation, but they require the merchant to let them keep the merchandise on penalty of fines and criminal charges of fraud towards the merchant. It is irrelevant how many times it happens before the merchant catches it, it is fully the merchant's responsibility to ensure proper pricing and billing.
Those charges will very likely be dropped, and I will expect a judge to sanction the ADA that brought them along with a counter suit against Lowes for harassment, pain and suffering, fraudulent prosecution, etc. as those laws don't discriminate between brick and mortar and online stores. Unless they have withheld a lot of detail about real, actual hacking (back end/front end manipulation by non standard software/something other than an OTS web browser, etc.)
Any decent lawyer will get this thrown out in 5 minutes and get the ADA who brought the charges sanctioned for overcharging and incompetence. The fact that the article did not describe how they did it likely indicates it was a flaw in the gift card processing code on Lowes end (i.e. exactly using up a gift card's balance resulted in the card remaining fully charged). If there was no code manipulation, intrusion or abnormal software used on the client side, this entire case falls apart.
The couple will not get to keep the merchandise because it was sent to them due to computer error on the part of Lowes, but the problem was apparently not on their end, it was on Lowes. A good attorney would probably also file a civil suit for a few hundred thousand in damages due to negligence on the part of Lowes because Lowes chose to pursue charges against the couple instead of apologizing to the couple for their mistake as the took back the merchandise. We will have to see when more facts come to light.
Bottom line, there is no substitute for good code, and good software engineers are worth their weight in gold, especially in this day and age. Lowes will probably end up spending north of $500K on this mess, assuming they don't get sued by the couple. That could easily double if they get sued. Thee error was probably in less than 2 lines of code.
Honestly I need more details than this to know if it was stealing or not. If I find an item on Amazon or some other online marketplace that shows up in the cart for $0.00 and I put it in my cart and "buy" it, does that make me a thief? If I walk into a brick and mortar store and I buy something that rings up for $0, and then go back and "buy out" the store of their free item, does that make it theft?
If I were to take the UPC from the "free" item and affix it to something else, now that would clearly be stealing, but it just depends on whose fault it is for making something free, IMHO.
The business has the right to charge what they want for items, and it is not up to the consumer to pay for something the business is giving away. In many states, laws specifically state that if you incorrectly price an item either in an advert or on store shelves, the business must honor the transaction or they can be in big legal trouble...
He will be charged, plead guilty, sit in jail for a week and be quietly traded to Russia for some poor bastard US citizen or diplomat that the FSB scoops off the street in Moscow. He knows this and would rather not draw out the process...
I bought one of those shareware licenses back around 1999 and I still run 5.666 almost daily. It is a great media player and is far superior to iTunes for listening to and managing music.
When the US wants to take over and rule the rest of the world, I would be happy to, until then your moral equivalence falls flat...
There is again a difference between having a constitution in theory and in practice. You are extremely naive if you think there is equivalence between the NSA and the FSB. As far as I am aware, the US hasn't spontaneously invaded any neutral countries recently, or mounted massive cyber attacks against said countries, shot down commercial airliners etc...
Having a constitution in theory and having a constitution in practice are two very different things. I suggest you educate yourself on the actual political state of Russia. You are dangerously naive if you think there is any equivalence between the FBI and the FSB.
" we do not sell or share your personally identifiable statistics"
So OK, unless the company signs a binding agreement with it's customers, in 6 months when the numbers are down they can decide to turn around and sell the data they have collected on you and you can't do a damn thing about it. Or in 2 years when a new CEO comes in and wants to boost profits to get a better bonus so they can buy the 52 foot yacht instead of the 35 footer, they can turn around and sell it. The bottom line is if the information gets collected, sooner or later it will get sold. The only way to really prevent this is for the company to destroy the data after a set time long enough to be used for their internal purposes, but short enough to prevent a money grab down the road.
Maybe the question to ask Kaspersky is what exactly would an inappropriate relationship with the FSB look like according to them? It seems like there is some pretty damning evidence that a bad actor state (Russia) has been working closely with Kaspersky in a way that violates the expectation of most of the free world. If Kaspersky is serious about clearing it's name, it should clearly define and limit it's relationship with the FSB and the Russian government. Unfortunately for Kaspersky, being based in Russia, a country without a constitution or bill of rights limits what they can actually back up with action, unless they shift the bulk of their organization out of Russia, and I don't see that happening.
The low cost of natural gas didn't help coal, but that was hardly the root cause for it's demise. https://longviewpower.com/news...
I am not even going to get into discussing CO2 with you. You clearly know the AGW arguments but have no background in hard science and thus no filter to determine valid science vs. pull it out their ass speculation/junk science. You are worried that we are turning into Venus huh? You do know that Venus receives more intense solar radiation than earth, plus Venus atmosphere is 97% plus CO2 (970,000 PPM), whereas on earth we are at 400PPM (or 0.04%). No, plants and animals both respriate and produce CO2, plants also happen to convert more CO2 than they use, and no, all biomass on earth do not exist in the margins. There is an active carbon cycle where plant growth is limited by the availability of CO2 (~98% of plant mass is built out of CO2 and H2O, the remaining 2% is minerals).
Regarding the ACA, if the Democrats wanted to make health care better, they should have gotten involved instead of sitting on their hands and trying to obstruct. They voted lock stock and barrel for the ACA and it is broken as hell. The Dims are putting their politics ahead of the people, and it will cost them dearly in the midterms, then the ACA will get repealed and we will get market reforms, HSAs and a lot of other common sense solutions to lower the costs of health care for everyone. Couple that with the booming job growth and most people will be able to buy the health insurance that is right for them (or join a health care cost sharing co-op). The only difference is we have to suffer through another 18 months of the ACA imploding.
Regarding education spending: Privatizing schools would solve virtually all the problems via competition. (Competition provides virtually everything else in your life of quality, you might think on that for a minute.) Dumb kids and kids with crappy parents would still be dumb and would wind up in trade schools doing manual labor (vouchers would work there too), but smart kids would be able to excel and compete globally. We already use what is essentially a voucher system for the university system and the world has not come to an end, in fact US universities are well respected around the world. The only people who don't want to see school vouchers happen are the bad/ignorant teachers and the teachers union and Dim politicians who get a huge chunk of their funds from the union through mandatory dues. Parents would love vouchers. There is zero evidence that competition would make schools worse and mountains of evidence that it would make schools better.
Regarding criminals: GTFO. Crime rates are at historic lows in large part to 3 strikes laws taking habitual criminals out of circulation. That you believe anyone wants people to be incarcerated for financial gain is pitiful (you need to pull your head out of whatever liberal echo chamber you have been living in). You need to accept that criminality is not an accident and criminals need to be removed from society (150 years ago, we used to hang most criminals and the world was better for it and society didn't have to pay 7% of all their tax funds to house evil people who chose to break the laws of the land, often injuring innocents in the process).
Regarding welfare: So please tell me what should be taxed to discourage all the people taking welfare and other entitlements? The reality is that people will always take free stuff as long as you offer it. The reason for the explosion of welfare under Obama is equal parts job destruction via ACA and regulations as well as the elimination of the legal requirement to be gainfully employed, in school or looking for work.
Regarding farmers: So according to you all farmers grow corn for high fructose corn syrup which is as addictive as Cocaine? (Food is addictive, once you start you don't stop eating it until you die). High fructose corn syrup is no
Pretty sure there are records of Trump paying millions in taxes. You need to cite something with actual facts before you try to pull that BS.
People on welfare and below the poverty line can have a net effective income in benefits of up to $45,000/year and pay zero taxes:
No income tax: Welfare and income below ~$40k(?) is not taxed, nor do they have to pay SSI/SDI
No property tax: Those who receive subsidized government housing pay no property tax
No Sales tax: Those on food stamps don't pay sales tax on food
No road tax: Those receiving free bus and train cards don't pay road taxes
No phone tax: Those with free "Obama" cell phones/plans don't pay phone tax
Thank you for playing, better luck next time.
Check either the labor participation rate or the U-6 number. At this point in time you just look foolish trying to say Obama had 5% unemployment. That the media were his accomplices in lying about the unemployment rate is no excuse after 8 years... If unemployment were really that low, wages would not have dropped by something like $4500 per year on average during Obama's tenure. A tight labor market causes wages to go up, not down.
You need some citations that contain actual statistics for your "facts". The green jobs lie was just that, a lie. Coal jobs were lost because Obama essentially banned coal fired power plants via regulations making them cost negative to operate. Not even gassfied coal plants could operate at a profit.
No one is complaining about clean air and clean water, but when you start treating a key atmospheric component that is essentially plant food (CO2) as a pollutant without real science (screaming and stomping your foot, claiming majority rule in science, and/or claiming the science is "over" are not valid science, but rather logical fallacies committed by those with weak arguments that lack hard science to back up their claims) that is a real problem for industry.
CO2 is produced by every living organism, and plants need it to live. It has historically been at higher levels pre industrial revolution, http://drtimball.com/2012/pre-... it already blocks all the IR bands at 100%, and adding more will not change that (don't try to feed me that speculative BS about upper vs lower atmospheric diffraction, that is pure speculative BS with zero science to back it up), but somehow we are teetering on the apocalypse, never mind the science and historical evidence.
"The poor pay zero taxes because their pay hasn't increased for the last 40 years while the value of their income has decreased for the last 40 years which has caused them to fall below the poverty line. Yes, for some reason, you can have a full time job and still be impoverished because assholes aren't paying you what you are really worth."
Actually, that is a lie. If you look at stratification of poor who are working (i.e. not on welfare) before Obama, ~65% stayed below the poverty line an average of 8 years or less, meaning with hard work they were able to enter the middle class. There are some working poor with either mental or psychological defects that prevent them from ever moving out of poverty, but that is just a fact of life and has always been the case since time immemorial. The welfare class and working poor exploded under Obama because he paid off campaign contributors using the stimulus package instead of shoring up the housing market, and he allowed massive illegal immigration, rubber stamp H1B immigration all while his policies destroyed millions of jobs. All that works together to create a glut of unskilled and skilled labor while simultaneously reducing the number of available jobs. Stack the socialistic redistribution of wealth through Obamacare, mainly borne out by the middle class and he got a long way to destroying the main voting block of the conservatives: the middle class. This is how you get the 27 year old Millennials living in their parents basement who have a college degree and other marketable skills but can't get a job.
As far as the ACA goes, the Repubicans only got 90% consensus in their own party, while not a single democrat voted for the repeal/replace, so Republicans have decided to let the ACA explode (which it is) and let the Dims ride that sinking ship into oblivion in the next election. The ACA has a few good ideas mixed in with an implementation designed to create more dependency, not reduce the cost of health care. It has already cost the US economy $100s of billions of dollars more than projected, and the markets are collapsing across the country. For those who actually buy their insurance, it has jacked up rates between 50% and 200% while at the same time increasing co pay and deductibles 300% to 1000%. That is an abject failure at containing costs if you pay for your insurance. If you are a freeloader with lots of medical problems, it is great for you, but that is only because the ACA is stealing from others to pay for your coverage, and that is unsustainable.
"Yeah, who needs the police, firefighters, hospitals, schools or any of that shit, right?
Since Google has changed it's policy from "do no evil" to "do the right (alt-left) thing", the purging of James Damore for a well written, thoughtful document that challenged the alt-left ethos https://medium.com/@Cernovich/... was the last straw for me. I have switched away from Google as my default search engine, removed the Chrome browser from my PC and directed all meaningful email away from my Gmail account. I have also switched from ABP to a pi-hole to deny all ad revenue to the leaches.
Google used to be a great tech company, but it is clear that they are no longer interested in science or the truth if it contradicts their worldview and are only secondarily interested in innovation. For a company through which the vast majority of the information in the world is filtered, that is a very bad thing. They are no longer interested in the most accurate results, they are interested in the right results, whatever they might determine that might be. They were already caught interfering with the autocomplete suggestions when searching for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections. I suspect that they will continue to dramatically lose market share until they get a CEO who cleans house of all the SJW types in positions of power and gets back to focusing on the core technology.
"most movies are rubbish, no matter how they try to package them or how much or how little they charge for them, and given the incredibly easy access we now have to all sorts of media and entertainment, the theaters are on borrowed time."
Exactly right, and the reason most are rubbish is because rather than focusing on telling a good story, something like 95% of all Hollywood movies are about virtue signaling their alt-left friends in Hollywood and proselytizing their world view. Think about it. When was the last time that you saw an action movie where the villain wasn't a white male corporate type (movies based on comic books and other pre-existing works don't count). Hell, they even changed the Mandarin to be a white male business type. When was the last time you saw a really good, emotionally gripping story with well developed characters and a coherent plot? Don't tell me it can't be done, because in the 1950s and 1960s Hollywood was cranking out dozens of this type of movie in something like 6 weeks, whereas now it takes them 2-3 years and you walk out of the theater shocked at the one dimensional characters, lack of character development, incoherent plot, etc...
I don't think it is even 6 months at this point, unless it is a Disney movie, it seems like 3 months from screen release to home theater release (usually digital on iTunes first, then disc release a couple of weeks later).
This exactly. They have slowly DRM'd themselves out of the DVD/BluRay business by charging $18 for a DVD or $25 for a BluRay and format locking it while services like Netflix and premium Hulu have tons of content to chose from. Want to stream your DVD to your tablet? Sorry, you can't. You need to hit up a digital service like iTunes and pay yet again for the pleasure unless you bought multi-format from the get go. Hell, I have VHS/DVD movies from years ago before online streaming was even a thing, but the MPAA thinks I should be forced to pay again for a digital copy? Why exactly? I only bought a license according to the MPAA, my SD license should be valid in perpetuity. There was no expiration date on my movie.
Technology changes markets and companies either adapt or get left behind. 30 years ago, encyclopedias were a thriving industry, today, those products no longer exist due to the innovation of the internet. In the same vein, consumers have spoken, and as the Luddites die out, the next generation will consume all of it's media on demand, commercial free in the comfort of wherever they want to view it from for a nominal fee (not $50 BTW, that is pure fantasy). Companies can adapt, or they can go bankrupt. There will still be niche markets, but they will be just that.
Or, alternatively, this is what happens when you destroy the job market like Obama did for the last 8 years with massive new regulation and Obamacare while simultaneously trying to buy votes by eliminating the work requirement for welfare recipients and massively expanding entitlement programs... The rich already pay 80% of all tax in the US http://www.newsmax.com/Finance... while the "poor" 45% Democrat voting block who thinks the rich don't pay enough pay ZERO taxes but enjoy all the general benefits as well as free healthcare, free housing, free food, free phones... the list goes on. http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
That said, the federal government as well as most states mentioned don't have an income problem, they have a spending problem.
"Right now, Ericsson is hiring engineers to repair the damage that earlier saving packages caused. It's crucial that most of all the Swedish R&D department remains somewhat protected. They are the ones who will come up with the new solutions that will drive sales in the long term,"
In other words, the last CEO was a typical MBA jackass who cut engineering/R&D as a short term cost savings measure, and now they are paying a huge price (~25% layoff based on 100k employees). It never ceases to amaze me how many CEOs view R&D as overhead, and cut those employees willy nilly and then laugh all the way to the bank when they pull the ripcord on their golden parachute in 5 years as the company tanks because they don't have any products to compete because they starved their pipeline to fatten the C-level executive bonuses. (A karmic law that will never be passed would be for management bonuses to be impounded for 5 years and distributed to any employees laid off for 5 years after the bonus is paid.)
The root cause of all this stupid is the practice of paying CEOs more than god in salary and bonuses for what amounts to a relatively simple job (look at the market, competition, position and guess where to go/what to do next). Regardless of what the CEOs might say, most larger, established companies would probably do better being guided by a simple algorithm that looks at maybe 15 key factors and then decides if the company should expand, how many new products to pursue etc. and then let market research and engineering feasiblity studies guide what products are selected using a Pugh study.
CEOs are fast becoming the emperor with no clothes and are in the same category as fund managers (hint: you are better off with an index fund, since fund managers are about as good as throwing darts at a wall). Companies need to come up with a similar, stable form of governance to an index fund.
Most real work is done by lower management, HR, sales, sales research, etc. "Vision" might be marketed by CEOs as some ineffable thing, but most companies would do a lot better long term hiring someone internally for $300k/year who knows WTF the company is in the business of doing.