The whining over privacy is annoying, none of you do anything about it except post and whine (yes the same thing I'm doing right now), so my opinion is don't leave a trail and you have nothing to worry about.
I travel to another city in my country a couple of times a month on business. I fly or take the night train depending on my meeting schedule. I've already noticed two other "regulars", one of which stands out because he seems very nervous. I almost greeted the other one when sitting next to him on the plane btw... our social impulses are strange that way.
Now, let's posit that the fidgety one travels for some nefarious purpose. If we are not under other kinds of surveillance, so it's not seen that we're not actually going to the same places while in that other city, a random search for correlation in travel patterns might single me out as suspicious purely based on my travel pattern. In my country that would probably have no consequenses for me, but in the US it might be troubling.
To put it in a wider perspective, a sensible way to look for accomplishes of known baddies, *if* you sat on a huge amount of travel data, might be to look for correlation between travel patterns. Just cast a huge net and see what comes up. You're surely unlucky if it happens to you, but the odds that it happens to *someone* is a lot larger when you look at a vast amount of travellers and destinations, like you have in the US.
Let's extend it even more: the amount of information they gather includes credit card transactions, *lack* of credit card transactions (indicating that you prefer cash), online behaviour (like forum postings), choice of TV entertainment, categories of items purchased, books read, books *not* read, dietary habits, etc etc.
You are singled out, and they decide to get a closer look at you; now something interesting happens: You are an innocent nerd. You buy suspicious electronics for your DIY projects. You are critical to the government, posting "This country is going to shit, fuck it, I'm voting third party" on Slashdot. You use strange communication channels like IRC and news, you are even hosting a TOR relay to assist subversives of other police states (huge red flag right there). You read many books of the political, anti-creationism or science variety, while you don't even *have* the bible on your Kindle. You are a vegetarian, but that might be to hide that you don't eat delicious bacon. You don't watch wholesome American entertainment like So You Think You Can Dance or America's Funniest Home Videos, instead you watch a lot of science shows and political commentary. You also have a couple of guns because you like things that go *bang*, and hey, they are so easy to get anyways.
You get the point. You have a good income, and the capacity and know-how to build doomsday devices in your basement (of course they won't find anything there, you're to smart for that). They can't even be sure they know about all your communications because some of it might have gone through your TOR relay from your live Liberté Linux CD which you downloaded out of curiosity. You might be taken in for questioning, but in a country where the government can "legally" imprison you indefinitely without a trial on a whim, why take the risk that you can somehow communicate with your terrorist buddies, maybe even pull the trigger of your evil plot? Better safe than sorry.
"Don't leave a trail": You could always go off the grid, live in your country bunker, never buy anything traceable, and stop communicating with your relatives. Generally, you are the local weirdo that is observed only a little more often than Sasquatch, and which good citizens tell their children to stay the hell away from. Good luck not being scrutinised for *that*.
My current monitor goes to 1920X1200. (16:10). I had a hard time finding it because the great majority of modern monitors are 16:9. (1920X1080). This one is an older NEC that's color accurate. I think I will use it until it can't be repaired anymore.
I am SOOO jealous!!
I just got a few Dell UltraSharp U2412M for work. Decent 1920x1200 monitors at $360 delivered, even in our ridiculously expensive country. Considering it's something you presumably use a lot, it's not very expensive. There are quite a lot of this type of monitor out there. At home I've got an older and more expensive Asus 1920x1200, but the Dells are very good quality.
You might have been sarcastic, in which case you got me:)
I realize that atheists don't believe such things are possible, because they don't believe in the supernatural as an a priori. So, based on their a priori, there is nothing different with or without. Based on a Christian's a priori, there are a number of things that an atheist will never experience:
(My emphasis).
Actually, atheists don't believe it has any effect because... it hasn't. Of course, *any* support and consolation a patient is aware of can have a positive effect on a patient (besides, you'd be kind of a dickhead if you didn't hope your relatives would live), but the prayers themselves are documented to have no effect.
It may not, but Creationists arrive at that number by doing scientific experiments.
No, they don't, they get that number from doctrine, and then set out to discredit almost every branch of science in order to "support" their delusion. They do this by saying "naaa, naaa, scientists are wrong" and then concluding that this automatically means that some god did it practically yesterday, which is of course a false dichotomy even if the scientists were wrong. Even worse is the argument "Scientists don't agree between themselves, therefore some god".
Also, your list of "evidence" is amusing. Your best evidence is not even valid. This is not fruitful as any amount of actual evidence won't sway you, but "if you're truly interested" in why I won't discuss it further see
(Look at the office ribbon - despite some of its nice features there are quite a few places where it just managed to add more work for the user to accomplish a task
I disagree entirely. I much prefer the ribbon to the old pull-down interface. Heck, even Matlab switched to a ribbon over the old drop down menus. Once again, it's that steep 30 minute learning curve throwing folks off, they just want to do it the old, lame way.
Good for you. For me it's been a few years, and I'm still pretty pissed at it. When MS deems it necessary to publish a "search the ribbon"-plugin, you know they've admitted failure. Case in point: I wanted to make a pivottable in Excel 2010. Where the fuck could it be? After a few minutes of staring at icons and expanding secondary options I googled and downloaded the "search commands" plugin. Turns out pivot stuff is no longer present in the fucking ribbon according to the plugin, how's that for convenience?
I guess that if you're of the point'n'drool secretary variety and the most advanced thing you've done is to change font colour to pink in winword, the ribbon won't slow you down much. If you're like me, and have used an estimated 90% of Excel's features at some point or another during the last thirteen years, the search commands is a godsend (and the ribbon is shit). Figuring out where the features are and how they've disguised them as icons (to cater to illiterates, I suppose) is a damned chore if most of the features you use are not on the home tab, or even in the goddamned ribbon at all. Give me some menus with text in them to scan any time, or even better an integrated search-as-you type option.
Presumably, some photons take a different - longer - path to reach his retinas; enough to at least reduce the flickering.
You must have missed that photons are quite speedy... to mitigate a 50 Hz flicker your room would have to be the size of France (or something like that).
That said, I only notice a 50 Hz flicker if the amplitude difference is large enough. In some gas-based streetlights it's bad, in most bulbs I've used in my house it's unnoticeable.
"Last you checked" you might also have seen people trying to figure out how stuff really happens, instead of blindly accepting ancient stories crafted for a populace with severe limitations in their knowledge of how *anything* works. It's scary to me that people like you focus on denigrating all of science in order to promote your single fairy tale, while blithely ignoring the huge plethora of evidence around you telling you that science actually works. I *really* don't understand what you think you'll achieve by this.
My gut says: net loss for simply carrying coolant vs. simply carrying O2.
I'm no rocket scientist, but it seems that the big savings is achieved by using passing air as reaction mass in an efficient manner. From the wiki:
Because the engine uses the atmosphere as reaction mass at low altitude, it will have a high specific impulse (around 2,800 seconds), and burn about one fifth of the propellant that would have been required by a conventional rocket.[34]
The page for the SABRE engine lists an ISP of 3600.
oh, and have fun trying to actually find where the program is with the unity interface (though to be fair, that could just be because I'm not that familiar with it yet)
I don't use the menus anymore, neither in Win7 nor in Linux. A tip: Hit the Windows key, and a live search feature will pop up. Entering the three first letters of whatever you want to launch will usually move it to the first hit.
What's in it for the rest of the world if Obama wins?
Nothing, really. The Obama adinistration is far to the right politically speaking. Romney is even further to the right, *and* a religious nut which will need to pander to his religious nutcase supporters. Personally I'm afraid that he is more willing to wage external wars in order to curb internal dissatisfaction. This is bad for the rest of the world (and, incidentally, for the U.S.).
Not comparable to war, but he's also liable to give corporations even freer reign over your diplomatic resources. They are already employed in order to threaten sovereign nations into adopting U.S. legislation (see Spain and copyright law), this will be worse under Romney, since he advocates even more corporate power.
But Obama already *does* do all of this, so the U.S. will continue to be the bully in the world schoolyard no matter which one you elect. The rest of the world just can't win with the current direction of U.S. administrations.
So, you *actually* want a phone that gets better battery life.
Yes, I do. An extra charger and a couple of batteries cost something like $13 delivered from Hong Kong. I don't need it every day, but it's handy to be able to use my phone without worrying about battery life if I'm traveling, for instance. Extra phone batteries is a cheap and easy way to alleviate most battery woes encountered in a modern society.
I also have this which I built for throwing in my backpack when needed. It gives med me five-and-something (tested) full recharges with a switching car charger, but frankly the largest usefulness and fun has been for whipping out a powered usb cable from nowhere when someone *else* is out of battery:)
True, but what if we thought about lighter-than-aircraft. The power to weight ratio is much different as lift is accomplished by differentials in gas density. Also they may be able to carry batteries that would allow for flight at night or low light.
Then there's the issue of speed. Non are very fast.
Yes, for person transport they would not be good, but they might be an alternative for relatively light-weight cargo transport? Faster than a ship, cheaper than an airliner. You would need some infrastructure in place, but vastly less than regular air freight do. They need less runway, you could use some of that space for solar power arrays or other cheap power sources which could charge batteries (or spin up flywheels) to top up their batteries even at night. They could probably even be autonomous or remotely controlled, so that you don't need to accomodate space for a pilot.
Also, why we don't see any wind-, solar- or wave-powered cargo ships for bulk cargo which may not be sensitive to transit time at all? It's probably because fuel is still cheap enough that it's not viable to develop new technology, but that might change in the future.
HTC is losing more ground than Nokia or RIM simply because of bad designs.
I have to disagree with you there. My oldish HTC Desire is a marvel of sturdiness and build quality. I also had a Samsung Galaxy S for a while, it's a good phone, but it felt like a cheap, creaking toy compared to the Desire. My next phone will surely be an HTC (probably a One S).
Living in a state that forbids early payment penalties helps.
That implies that there are states in which you will be penalised for paying your debt in full early? While that is probably every credit company's wet dream, it's fairly fucked up that they are allowed to do so.
What surprises me about this story is that the account termination results in wiping of her Kindle.
They did not wipe her Kindle. That was a misunderstanding in TFA.
As the Kindle phones home to verify DRM an account closure would very likely render the books unreadable on the Kindle as well if it wasn't broken, yielding a similar result. I'd be surprised if she, as a persona non grata with Amazon, were allowed to keep the copies in her Kindle. It'll be exciting to see if there are any additional treatment of this case, also because it accentuates a very real problem for readers located outside certain regional blocks. She *did*, after all, try to pay for her content rather than going the easier route of a the Buccaneer's Cove.
I know about the rather archaic regional distribution rights system which originated with traditional publishing, but for ebooks price gouging is a large part of it. It's cute how Amazon *knows* that I'm in Norway, and they keep sending me promotional e-mails with low, low American prices that are suddenly triple or worse when I click the link to amazon.com, if they're "available in my country" at all. I've been in contact with support about this, the best they could offer was to disable the e-mails.
This regional price gouging pisses me off no end, by the way, and is a hurdle that needs to be crossed by publishers and vendors. It might have been more palatable if the book in question was a translated or otherwise localised product, but for the identical file I should pay the identical amount of dollars. Even worse is the fact that they can't figure out how to sell certain books *at all*, I don't even understand that one as it is obviously a huge amount of lost sales to them.
You can just strip the DRM off your Kindle purchases and then back them up.
Sure, it's trivial, and where I live it's very likely also legal to do so in order to read on the hardware of your choice. It's not been tested in court for ebooks, but a similar case was lost regarding DVD playback in a reasonably high-profile case involving a certain "DVD Jon". Sadly Big Content's lackeys backed off before we got a "proper" legal precedent in our highest court instance, but the results in lesser courts were pretty damning for them. Experiences like the one Linn had is a reminder that liberating and backing up is the prudent thing to do.
Amazon is probably on shaky legal ground as well, as there are specific requirements to be able to call a transaction a "sale" here. Refusing to do further business with her for obscure and non-specified reasons are probably OK, but removing access to products she's paid for is probably not, at least not without substantiating why they're doing it, and likely not even then. This is according to our Consumer Ombudsman organisation, which carries some weight for traders operating in Norway, or even out of Luxembourg as is the case with Amazon in Europe.
If this were true, for every 10 times you are shortchanged, you should have another 10 times when you receive too much money. How often does that happen?
Actually this happens a lot. Stores tend to lose money on cash transaction errors every day, simply because people always complain if they are short-changed, but often don't when they receive too much change. I think that deliberate short-changing for the purpose of pocketing the surplus is rare, as the employer tends to watch people handling cash very closely.
The behaviour of one local corner-shop was strange; they gave me correct change, but consistently dialed up a larger amount on the register, which was partly hidden behind the counter. When I first saw it I notified the guy, believing it was in error, but he was surprisingly aggressive and told me to mind my own business. This had me baffled until I realised that it was probably part of a money laundering scheme.
That's physical, actual paper, snail mail. No online forms, no emails, no calls.
I wonder about this. TL;DR: Is there *any* reason why they can demand this?
Firstly: As a PayPal customer I have received no explicit notification of any kind regarding this change. My potential email to them would be the only substantial correspondence between us regarding this matter. Of course their arbitrary conditions are just included to make it seem difficult to "opt-out", but how does it carry any validity?
Secondly: If this flies, what's to stop a company from including arbitrary conditions, something like the brilliant quip by ThatsNotPudding above suggested: "Lastly, the agreement must be accompanied by six Unobtainums (TM) breakfast cereal boxtops (15 lb. boxes only), each featuring a Notary Public seal from the Third Bank of Neptune. The agreement must have been written on parchment during the reign of Charlemagne." If companies could actually get away with this, they would do it. Since they don't I suspect it's not that simple.
Thirdly: Email seems to be an acceptable channel for sending legal notifications these days, see for instance DMCA notifications. If I demand that they send any objections via Telex, would that carry the same weight? We actually have a Telex terminal somewhere at work, although I suspect it's not connected and in working order. Telegram service still exists in our neighbour country, though, that might be an option:)
As for the clause itself: Where I live you can't contract away a basic right in this way. I can sue anyone I want to [although almost nobody ever does, as opposed to some other nations I've heard of:)]. The court might decide to throw me out, someone I'm doing business with can't. Class actions are uncommon here, but not unheard of. There is no legal reasons anyone can bring to bear that makes me unable to join one if it surfaced. Someone coming to court whining that an EULA precluded my participating in a potential legal dispute would certainly not improve their case.
Slashdot Mirror
The whining over privacy is annoying, none of you do anything about it except post and whine (yes the same thing I'm doing right now), so my opinion is don't leave a trail and you have nothing to worry about.
I travel to another city in my country a couple of times a month on business. I fly or take the night train depending on my meeting schedule. I've already noticed two other "regulars", one of which stands out because he seems very nervous. I almost greeted the other one when sitting next to him on the plane btw... our social impulses are strange that way.
Now, let's posit that the fidgety one travels for some nefarious purpose. If we are not under other kinds of surveillance, so it's not seen that we're not actually going to the same places while in that other city, a random search for correlation in travel patterns might single me out as suspicious purely based on my travel pattern. In my country that would probably have no consequenses for me, but in the US it might be troubling.
To put it in a wider perspective, a sensible way to look for accomplishes of known baddies, *if* you sat on a huge amount of travel data, might be to look for correlation between travel patterns. Just cast a huge net and see what comes up. You're surely unlucky if it happens to you, but the odds that it happens to *someone* is a lot larger when you look at a vast amount of travellers and destinations, like you have in the US.
Let's extend it even more: the amount of information they gather includes credit card transactions, *lack* of credit card transactions (indicating that you prefer cash), online behaviour (like forum postings), choice of TV entertainment, categories of items purchased, books read, books *not* read, dietary habits, etc etc.
You are singled out, and they decide to get a closer look at you; now something interesting happens: You are an innocent nerd. You buy suspicious electronics for your DIY projects. You are critical to the government, posting "This country is going to shit, fuck it, I'm voting third party" on Slashdot. You use strange communication channels like IRC and news, you are even hosting a TOR relay to assist subversives of other police states (huge red flag right there). You read many books of the political, anti-creationism or science variety, while you don't even *have* the bible on your Kindle. You are a vegetarian, but that might be to hide that you don't eat delicious bacon. You don't watch wholesome American entertainment like So You Think You Can Dance or America's Funniest Home Videos, instead you watch a lot of science shows and political commentary. You also have a couple of guns because you like things that go *bang*, and hey, they are so easy to get anyways.
You get the point. You have a good income, and the capacity and know-how to build doomsday devices in your basement (of course they won't find anything there, you're to smart for that). They can't even be sure they know about all your communications because some of it might have gone through your TOR relay from your live Liberté Linux CD which you downloaded out of curiosity. You might be taken in for questioning, but in a country where the government can "legally" imprison you indefinitely without a trial on a whim, why take the risk that you can somehow communicate with your terrorist buddies, maybe even pull the trigger of your evil plot? Better safe than sorry.
"Don't leave a trail": You could always go off the grid, live in your country bunker, never buy anything traceable, and stop communicating with your relatives. Generally, you are the local weirdo that is observed only a little more often than Sasquatch, and which good citizens tell their children to stay the hell away from. Good luck not being scrutinised for *that*.
I'm glad I don't live in the US.
My current monitor goes to 1920X1200. (16:10). I had a hard time finding it because the great majority of modern monitors are 16:9. (1920X1080). This one is an older NEC that's color accurate. I think I will use it until it can't be repaired anymore.
I am SOOO jealous!!
I just got a few Dell UltraSharp U2412M for work. Decent 1920x1200 monitors at $360 delivered, even in our ridiculously expensive country. Considering it's something you presumably use a lot, it's not very expensive. There are quite a lot of this type of monitor out there. At home I've got an older and more expensive Asus 1920x1200, but the Dells are very good quality.
You might have been sarcastic, in which case you got me :)
Healing the sick through prayer.
I realize that atheists don't believe such things are possible, because they don't believe in the supernatural as an a priori. So, based on their a priori, there is nothing different with or without. Based on a Christian's a priori, there are a number of things that an atheist will never experience:
(My emphasis).
Actually, atheists don't believe it has any effect because... it hasn't. Of course, *any* support and consolation a patient is aware of can have a positive effect on a patient (besides, you'd be kind of a dickhead if you didn't hope your relatives would live), but the prayers themselves are documented to have no effect.
It may not, but Creationists arrive at that number by doing scientific experiments.
No, they don't, they get that number from doctrine, and then set out to discredit almost every branch of science in order to "support" their delusion. They do this by saying "naaa, naaa, scientists are wrong" and then concluding that this automatically means that some god did it practically yesterday, which is of course a false dichotomy even if the scientists were wrong. Even worse is the argument "Scientists don't agree between themselves, therefore some god".
Also, your list of "evidence" is amusing. Your best evidence is not even valid. This is not fruitful as any amount of actual evidence won't sway you, but "if you're truly interested" in why I won't discuss it further see
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD220.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD510.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC371_1.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE311.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD701.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD015.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/c14.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE261.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD221_1.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD303.html
TL;DR
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood.html
(Look at the office ribbon - despite some of its nice features there are quite a few places where it just managed to add more work for the user to accomplish a task
I disagree entirely. I much prefer the ribbon to the old pull-down interface. Heck, even Matlab switched to a ribbon over the old drop down menus. Once again, it's that steep 30 minute learning curve throwing folks off, they just want to do it the old, lame way.
Good for you. For me it's been a few years, and I'm still pretty pissed at it. When MS deems it necessary to publish a "search the ribbon"-plugin, you know they've admitted failure. Case in point: I wanted to make a pivottable in Excel 2010. Where the fuck could it be? After a few minutes of staring at icons and expanding secondary options I googled and downloaded the "search commands" plugin. Turns out pivot stuff is no longer present in the fucking ribbon according to the plugin, how's that for convenience?
I guess that if you're of the point'n'drool secretary variety and the most advanced thing you've done is to change font colour to pink in winword, the ribbon won't slow you down much. If you're like me, and have used an estimated 90% of Excel's features at some point or another during the last thirteen years, the search commands is a godsend (and the ribbon is shit). Figuring out where the features are and how they've disguised them as icons (to cater to illiterates, I suppose) is a damned chore if most of the features you use are not on the home tab, or even in the goddamned ribbon at all. Give me some menus with text in them to scan any time, or even better an integrated search-as-you type option.
Presumably, some photons take a different - longer - path to reach his retinas; enough to at least reduce the flickering.
You must have missed that photons are quite speedy... to mitigate a 50 Hz flicker your room would have to be the size of France (or something like that).
That said, I only notice a 50 Hz flicker if the amplitude difference is large enough. In some gas-based streetlights it's bad, in most bulbs I've used in my house it's unnoticeable.
I've (unintentionally) measured the oscillating light output of an incandescent while I was developing an optical trigger circuit...
That is awesome in a weird way, kudos :)
"Last you checked" you might also have seen people trying to figure out how stuff really happens, instead of blindly accepting ancient stories crafted for a populace with severe limitations in their knowledge of how *anything* works. It's scary to me that people like you focus on denigrating all of science in order to promote your single fairy tale, while blithely ignoring the huge plethora of evidence around you telling you that science actually works. I *really* don't understand what you think you'll achieve by this.
Don't worry about it. The idea of an escape goat will make a lot of people smile :-)
Agreed. It certainly made me chuckle :)
... big savings is achieved by using passing air as reaction mass ...
Oh man, bad choice of words. Sorry.
My gut says: net loss for simply carrying coolant vs. simply carrying O2.
I'm no rocket scientist, but it seems that the big savings is achieved by using passing air as reaction mass in an efficient manner. From the wiki:
Because the engine uses the atmosphere as reaction mass at low altitude, it will have a high specific impulse (around 2,800 seconds), and burn about one fifth of the propellant that would have been required by a conventional rocket.[34]
The page for the SABRE engine lists an ISP of 3600.
No, it isn't.You're confusing Scandinavia and the "Nordic countries".
oh, and have fun trying to actually find where the program is with the unity interface (though to be fair, that could just be because I'm not that familiar with it yet)
I don't use the menus anymore, neither in Win7 nor in Linux. A tip: Hit the Windows key, and a live search feature will pop up. Entering the three first letters of whatever you want to launch will usually move it to the first hit.
What's in it for the rest of the world if Obama wins?
Nothing, really. The Obama adinistration is far to the right politically speaking. Romney is even further to the right, *and* a religious nut which will need to pander to his religious nutcase supporters. Personally I'm afraid that he is more willing to wage external wars in order to curb internal dissatisfaction. This is bad for the rest of the world (and, incidentally, for the U.S.).
Not comparable to war, but he's also liable to give corporations even freer reign over your diplomatic resources. They are already employed in order to threaten sovereign nations into adopting U.S. legislation (see Spain and copyright law), this will be worse under Romney, since he advocates even more corporate power.
But Obama already *does* do all of this, so the U.S. will continue to be the bully in the world schoolyard no matter which one you elect. The rest of the world just can't win with the current direction of U.S. administrations.
... and anything less simply
... allows you to finish your posts? :)
So, you *actually* want a phone that gets better battery life.
Yes, I do. An extra charger and a couple of batteries cost something like $13 delivered from Hong Kong. I don't need it every day, but it's handy to be able to use my phone without worrying about battery life if I'm traveling, for instance. Extra phone batteries is a cheap and easy way to alleviate most battery woes encountered in a modern society.
I also have this which I built for throwing in my backpack when needed. It gives med me five-and-something (tested) full recharges with a switching car charger, but frankly the largest usefulness and fun has been for whipping out a powered usb cable from nowhere when someone *else* is out of battery :)
True, but what if we thought about lighter-than-aircraft. The power to weight ratio is much different as lift is accomplished by differentials in gas density. Also they may be able to carry batteries that would allow for flight at night or low light.
Then there's the issue of speed. Non are very fast.
Yes, for person transport they would not be good, but they might be an alternative for relatively light-weight cargo transport? Faster than a ship, cheaper than an airliner. You would need some infrastructure in place, but vastly less than regular air freight do. They need less runway, you could use some of that space for solar power arrays or other cheap power sources which could charge batteries (or spin up flywheels) to top up their batteries even at night. They could probably even be autonomous or remotely controlled, so that you don't need to accomodate space for a pilot.
Also, why we don't see any wind-, solar- or wave-powered cargo ships for bulk cargo which may not be sensitive to transit time at all? It's probably because fuel is still cheap enough that it's not viable to develop new technology, but that might change in the future.
HTC is losing more ground than Nokia or RIM simply because of bad designs.
I have to disagree with you there. My oldish HTC Desire is a marvel of sturdiness and build quality. I also had a Samsung Galaxy S for a while, it's a good phone, but it felt like a cheap, creaking toy compared to the Desire. My next phone will surely be an HTC (probably a One S).
Living in a state that forbids early payment penalties helps.
That implies that there are states in which you will be penalised for paying your debt in full early? While that is probably every credit company's wet dream, it's fairly fucked up that they are allowed to do so.
Doesn't matter. Have you seen those tiny arms? T Rex will never be able to shoot straight.
Exactly
What surprises me about this story is that the account termination results in wiping of her Kindle.
They did not wipe her Kindle. That was a misunderstanding in TFA.
As the Kindle phones home to verify DRM an account closure would very likely render the books unreadable on the Kindle as well if it wasn't broken, yielding a similar result. I'd be surprised if she, as a persona non grata with Amazon, were allowed to keep the copies in her Kindle. It'll be exciting to see if there are any additional treatment of this case, also because it accentuates a very real problem for readers located outside certain regional blocks. She *did*, after all, try to pay for her content rather than going the easier route of a the Buccaneer's Cove.
I know about the rather archaic regional distribution rights system which originated with traditional publishing, but for ebooks price gouging is a large part of it. It's cute how Amazon *knows* that I'm in Norway, and they keep sending me promotional e-mails with low, low American prices that are suddenly triple or worse when I click the link to amazon.com, if they're "available in my country" at all. I've been in contact with support about this, the best they could offer was to disable the e-mails.
This regional price gouging pisses me off no end, by the way, and is a hurdle that needs to be crossed by publishers and vendors. It might have been more palatable if the book in question was a translated or otherwise localised product, but for the identical file I should pay the identical amount of dollars. Even worse is the fact that they can't figure out how to sell certain books *at all*, I don't even understand that one as it is obviously a huge amount of lost sales to them.
You can just strip the DRM off your Kindle purchases and then back them up.
Sure, it's trivial, and where I live it's very likely also legal to do so in order to read on the hardware of your choice. It's not been tested in court for ebooks, but a similar case was lost regarding DVD playback in a reasonably high-profile case involving a certain "DVD Jon". Sadly Big Content's lackeys backed off before we got a "proper" legal precedent in our highest court instance, but the results in lesser courts were pretty damning for them. Experiences like the one Linn had is a reminder that liberating and backing up is the prudent thing to do.
Amazon is probably on shaky legal ground as well, as there are specific requirements to be able to call a transaction a "sale" here. Refusing to do further business with her for obscure and non-specified reasons are probably OK, but removing access to products she's paid for is probably not, at least not without substantiating why they're doing it, and likely not even then. This is according to our Consumer Ombudsman organisation, which carries some weight for traders operating in Norway, or even out of Luxembourg as is the case with Amazon in Europe.
If this were true, for every 10 times you are shortchanged, you should have another 10 times when you receive too much money. How often does that happen?
Actually this happens a lot. Stores tend to lose money on cash transaction errors every day, simply because people always complain if they are short-changed, but often don't when they receive too much change. I think that deliberate short-changing for the purpose of pocketing the surplus is rare, as the employer tends to watch people handling cash very closely.
The behaviour of one local corner-shop was strange; they gave me correct change, but consistently dialed up a larger amount on the register, which was partly hidden behind the counter. When I first saw it I notified the guy, believing it was in error, but he was surprisingly aggressive and told me to mind my own business. This had me baffled until I realised that it was probably part of a money laundering scheme.
No, seriously. Here is the email I received from PayPal on 10/10/2012 at 1am:
No, I didn't. I suppose that they wouldn't want to send it to customers in countries where a company can't deny you access to the legal system.
That's physical, actual paper, snail mail. No online forms, no emails, no calls.
I wonder about this. TL;DR: Is there *any* reason why they can demand this?
Firstly: As a PayPal customer I have received no explicit notification of any kind regarding this change. My potential email to them would be the only substantial correspondence between us regarding this matter. Of course their arbitrary conditions are just included to make it seem difficult to "opt-out", but how does it carry any validity?
Secondly: If this flies, what's to stop a company from including arbitrary conditions, something like the brilliant quip by ThatsNotPudding above suggested: "Lastly, the agreement must be accompanied by six Unobtainums (TM) breakfast cereal boxtops (15 lb. boxes only), each featuring a Notary Public seal from the Third Bank of Neptune. The agreement must have been written on parchment during the reign of Charlemagne." If companies could actually get away with this, they would do it. Since they don't I suspect it's not that simple.
Thirdly: Email seems to be an acceptable channel for sending legal notifications these days, see for instance DMCA notifications. If I demand that they send any objections via Telex, would that carry the same weight? We actually have a Telex terminal somewhere at work, although I suspect it's not connected and in working order. Telegram service still exists in our neighbour country, though, that might be an option :)
As for the clause itself: Where I live you can't contract away a basic right in this way. I can sue anyone I want to [although almost nobody ever does, as opposed to some other nations I've heard of :)]. The court might decide to throw me out, someone I'm doing business with can't. Class actions are uncommon here, but not unheard of. There is no legal reasons anyone can bring to bear that makes me unable to join one if it surfaced. Someone coming to court whining that an EULA precluded my participating in a potential legal dispute would certainly not improve their case.