Why is that? In practice the consumer benefits from the transaction more than the business.
But, as is argued in the whitepaper in TFA, the consumer does not benefit in this case.
$600 for Office is not a lot of money, try hiring a personal secretary to do what you're able to do with the Office tools. $300 for an OS?
What in the name of CMOT Dibbler has the cost of hiring a secretary got to do with the inflated margin MS charge for office?
Do you have any idea what OS's used to cost before MS came out?
And this would relevant because...?
There are a lot of things not to like about MS, but I really don't think anyone can claim they've done anything but drive prices down to the point where computers are affordable for the masses.
I'm inlined to credit Moore's law for that one, personally. Perhaps you'd like to explain how this one works?
Can you imagine how much it would cost the industry AND all government operations if we didn't have a de facto standard in the form of Microsoft? Crush Microsoft and you have an epidemic ofo unemployment in your hands: most MCSEs won't be able to hack arcane *nix systems you no doubt cheer for.
I do find it interesting that you see the only two alternatives as being Microsoft in it's current monopolistic form, or no Microsoft at all.
Personally I was thinking more along the lines of
what if MS stopped bullying the OEMs and the hardware boys. They could let them sell Linux PCs as well as Windows. Not the crappy, crippled twice-the-price for half-the-spec systems occasionally used to maintain a pretense at competition, but a genuine level playing field.
You would seem to think that any such concession would inevitably lead to the destruction of the software giant. The only way I can see in which that might follow is if MS' offerings have become utterly debased and devoid of all value.
A damning indictment coming from an apparent support of Microsoft. It's also somewhat further than I'd have been prepared to go myself.
You don't think you might be guilty of a touch of the old groupthink yourself, do you?
I am looking at them from the point of view that it would be nice to have a government backed proof of identity.
And this is going to give what, precisely, that your passport does not? No one insists on a passport before they accept a cheque.
What does this governemt backed ID get you?
What purpose can it serve that your passport cannot?
I still haven't heard anything worth shelling out 100 quid for.
And yes, there are identity theft issues. And privacy ones. And issues of civil liberties. And they're still using it to hit us with yet another bloody tax. And they won't give straight answers to questions about the pestilent thing...
It was more those smug self righteous hypocrites in the cabinet that really got my blood boiling.
Meh. I'm going to take a major national resource and sell it off, so it can be bought up by foreign corporations and asset stripped. I'm going to do this despite massive grassroots opposition to the scheme, and in return I'm going to get a seat on the board of the winning company and a fat sinecure after this government finally collapses. And there's nothing you can do about it.... peasant.
So in some respect, I find the tories election failure quite reassuring. People finally seem to be learning that just because labour are a pile of excrement, that doesn't mean that the Tories have stopped being shits.
all the Conservatives do now is try to copy Labour but out-do them.
I think they're a single political; party that split into two teams. They can take turns in power. Once you're in, the game is too see how much you can piss on the electorate before they rebel and let the other team continue your policies using new rhetoric.
Or to put it another way, Big Money has a hand each up the arses of Blair and Howard both. They face the camera and say "Gottle of Geer" and "That's the way to do it!" and whack each other over the head with the sausages while we try to decide which glove puppet best represents our interests.
And they have the nerve to describe this as "Democracy".
Really? I thought visas was supposed to stop unwanteds from gaining permission to enter the country. You mean terrorists arent unwanted?
If you mean that passports and visas serve a valid purpose, I think you'll find that the GP already said that.
Alternatively, if you mean that ID cards will perform some useful anti-terrorist function, perhaps you might explain what that function is and how it will operate. I know a lot of us have been waiting for the government to address that very point.
It is really annoying, that zooming is done differently: google: wheel down: zoom in ms: wheel down: zoom out
Ah, yes. You see, this is a common misconception in the IT world. A lot of otherwise intelligent people think that just because Microsoft are innovating from behind again, that means they should conform to whatever de facto standards may already have been established.
People are well aware of Microsoft's excellent track record in innovating with the ideas of others. So it is quite natural that when these people see a company like Google indulging in a spot of pre-emptive copying, they fall into the error of assuming that just because Microsoft came up with the idea second, that means they didn't do it first.
Once you disregard this spurious and distracting datum, it becomes clear that Google have the responsibility to conform to Microsoft's interface. It's really quite simple.
"Nice little IT industry you got there, guvnor - be a shame if anything was to happen to it. I expect you'll be wanting to join the World Trade Organisation too. Only I hear them fellow can take a dim view of open source software. Could violate up to hundreds of patents, they say. That sort of compensation can be brutal, if you get my drift, squire.
"Better for all concerned if you get your software from Microsoft, really. Safer too. I don't have to draw you a picture, do I guv?"
Which is roughly what Ballmer said at a trade conference at Asia, not so very long ago.
I'm not mad keen on ads. Very few are. Internet ads tend to be needlessly intrusive and distracting. I see no reason to help someone craft ads I find even harder to ignore.
I would hope that whether they show you an ad or not really doesn't affect you. It's like not listening to an opposing argument because you're afraid that you might actually agree, because your argument/mind is too weak.
Sir, but I have better things to do than stand in one place 24/7 while every idiot in the world lines up to regale me, one by one, with the same brain dead arguments again and again.
You proceede from a false premise. I block advertisments that annoy me, that disrupt my concentration, and that waste my time.
Advertisments that fail to offend me are not blocked. This should serve the evolutionary purpose as allow the wetched things to waste my
working time. Of course, agencies that persistently offend are blocked too. I trust this too will provide badly needed feedback into the system.
Which isn't to say there isn't such happening, e.g. Claria is still in business, despite the fact that all the paid links in google are "Remove Claria Spyware Here" and nearly everyone calls them "the spyware company formerly known as Gator".
Heh, yeah.
I worry about first party cookies significantly less than I worry about using a credit card at a restaurant. After all, the waiter has more than enough time to copy your CC#, the security code on the back, your signature,/and/ the magstripe.
True. But you can disclaim the transaction. And if enough people do it the resauranteur ends up in court from the credit card people for fraud which is the main reason the system works.
On the other hand we have no way to monitor what happens with our tracking data. And given that I don't want it to exist in the first place...
If you jotted down your transaction ID, nope.
Hmmm... I think I'm happy to assume responsibility for keeping my transaction ids, just as I assume responsibiity for keeping my receipts.
That suggests another difference between your bricks-and-mortar shop and an internet outlet. The internet site has some failure modes that a human being doesn't have.
For instance, if a meatspace shopkeeper sells the business, he doesn't sit down with the new owner and describe every customer from memory: "About six-two, big coat and goggly eyes and a really long wooly scarf. Likes S/F". But if a cyberstore sells up, they pass on the data as part of the equity. Equally, the human shopkeeper doesn't get his brain hacked or stolen or retrieved from a dumpster after an upgrade. And with all those triple opt-in email addresses too...
>What do they do? Make it up the night before? Yuck!
Some of the ingredients, yes. Which is partly why I don't care for the other stuff they make:)
Let me cut through this cloudy ambiguity. The cookie represents the state of the client/server system, stored between
sessions. It's misleading to call it either "client state" or "server state", certainly to make a distinction between
the two, when we're talking about the session, which is the state of the system, composed of both client and server.
That's broadly true for web based sessions, but not for client/server in
general. Quick example: imagine a client/server based flight sim. There's at least three
ways you could write it:
Server stores the state: The client sends control signals and receives bitmaps for display. all the simulation is done
on the server.
Client stores the state: Client does all the simulation. All the server does is return map info. Requests are of the form: give me the view from map co-ordinate x,y at bearing 090, so the server is stateless.
Hybrid: client stores plane internal state (speed, height, fuel), server stores plane location. This works well for multiplayer games where the server needs to know where each player is, but detailed calculation can be better done on client machines.
That's being just a bit picky, I'll admit. Still, the point is that there's more to client/server than just webapps.
So I said that the marketers should, rather than just whining, fund the development of the better UI. Now, what's wrong with any of that?
Nothing I can see. Although I am going to be looking with suspicion at any marketing specced UI, since what they call "functionality" I tend to call "spyware".
That said, there are a few firefox extensions that do pretty much what you want already. I can see you'd want to tweak the interface a bit given your target audience, but the basics are there. That and a bit of firefox evangelism...
Your browser's state, independent of the server's access to it, is not part of the "client/server" system, so it's irrelevant. Your email MUA has a state too, but that's also irrelevant to the Web C/S infosystem, unless accessible to the server.
That turns out not to be the case. The client state determines which requests get sent; the server doesn't care. Were you really unaware of this, or was it just your turn to be "so disingenuous as to be specious?"
Now, you've done some exaggeration of your own, really into a different category, with your distortion of my statement that marketers should do something to fix the problem, rather than just complain about it.
You said "change the false perception". That's very much a marketer's way of thinking.
Likewise with your projection of "morality" onto the "goodness" or "badness" of cookies
Um, your projection, not mine. I argued for their amorality. That's "amoral" as distinct from "immoral", yes?
Of course it has nothing to do with the "morality" of a technology
So you're agreeing with me, albeit in a highly contentious tone. Fair enough.
Most people will use more compex apps when they're more convenient than that, and need a better UI. That helps them distinguish between "tracking" and "history", which is a matter of their perception of their own privacy.
Perhaps it would help if you said what this UI had to be applied to. I've been assuming you meant bettre UIs for web apps, but perhaps you meant browsers.
But even if you did, I can't see what would stop the forces of darkness using "session history" cookies to store tracking data. To whatever limited extent they may differ in the first place.
Just complaining about it, like marketers do, isn't helping. Just shutting them off, which severely limits the features of the platform, is also inadequate.
Personally, I allow session cookies by default, and I can whitelist any site that can convince me they have a need to track my behavior between visits. The only one to come close there is
google so I can store my prefs.
Within those parameters, I can't really see what you hope to achive.
I'll grant people could do with a better understanding of what cookies do and why session cookies can be a good idea. But you've far from convinced me that there's a case for
intersession cookies, or that there could be a way to discriminate between "session history" cookies and trackers.
So, I'm sorry but at the moment it just sounds like you're looking for a form of words that'll let marketers sneak tracking cookies in through the back door under the guise of session history. That's not an accusation BTW, just explaining how it sounds to me given my imperfect understanding of your aims.
A client/server system without persistent client state is unuseably crippled.
But my client - my web browser - does have a persistent state. It knows exactly what state it's in, and doesn't need cookies to keep track of itself. Oh wait, let me guess, you meant a persistent client state accessable by the server?
Unfortunately, in that case, your statement simply isn't true. There are countless client/server applications that work perfectly well with a stateless server. I've designed a few of them myself.
Consider a web server and my browser. I can block cookies entirely And you know what? If I do that, the vast majority of web sites function just fine, thank you. I don't call that "unusably crippled".
Of course, there are some applications where the server needs knowledge of client state. And if you're trying to implement such a servive with a web architecure using a standard webserver, then it's not going to work with browsers that disable cookies.
Marketers could stop complaining, and fund better UIs that decrease the false perception that cookies are bad.
So attempt to change peoples perceptions rather than change the behavior that led to the problem. How very "marketing".
BTW, if the perception of cookies as "bad" is false, so is any perception that they are "good". Cookies are an amoral technology. It is only the use to which they are put that can be considered in terms of morality.
Their stealth makes them sinister, and their unmanageability makes people throw out the benign majority with the tiny malign minority.
Yet somehow, in the days before I blocked all bar session cookies, the persistent third party tracking cookies used to be far more prevalent than the sessions ones.
By being able to learn what its customers want they will be able to create products which better fulfill their needs.
Post a survey page. That's what people did the days before cookies.
Incidentally, what create what products? Most of the stores I visit are box shifters for other companies. Most of the sites I visit aren't even stores.
Yes, god forbid I get an ad telling me about something that might interest me.
Gosh yes. I just live for the opportunity to give you all the information you need to manipulate me more efficiently into buying more junk I don't need at every possible opportunity. Really, that's all I've ever wanted from a web site is better adverts. Hell, let's lose the content altogether and just have ads.
Makes you wonder why no one's written software to stop those nasty web pages covering all those nice popunder adverts, doesn't it?
Many places probably does do that, but it is rather short-sighted. The minute somebody uses another computer and sees a cheaper price, they'll probably never shop with you again.
Alas short-termism seems to be modern disease. Grab what you can and get out. After all, if revenues start dropping, they can always change the domain and the branding and start again, right?
It's a question of trust, and this is an area where trust has been abused.
And if you walk into my bookstore, I'll give you the same price as any random person. But if I know you like sci-fi, I'd be sure to mention that if you don't mind waiting to buy that book, next week we have a 20% off sale on sci-fi if we haven't put up the signs yet.
But if you haven't put up your signs, you didn't update your website, so you can't tell me anyway. unless you're proposing to spam me at a later date - in which case I don't want your cookies, thank you, or anything else you might have.
And if you come in with a book and say you'd like to return it, but you don't have a receipt, I'll give you the same store credit I give everyone else. But if I remember selling it to you, I'll give you a refund if you don't want anything else right now.
Yes, yes, yes. But this is the internet. I have a copy of the sales details and so should you. And I have a record of the credit card transaction. And so should you. So an honest trader is going to give me the refund anyway, so I don't need your cookie. Do I?
When I go get lunch from the local sandwich shop, I wait in line like everyone else, but I get my food faster because the staff knows me and doesn't have to ask what I want.
What, like you always have a tuna-and-sweetcorn bap?
They don't treat the other customers worse, they just don't know the other customers' habits.
What do they do? Make it up the night before? Yuck!
Seriously, this service could be offered with a subscription. which has the advantage that I know up front what's happening.
At any rate, I think leaving cookies on by default helps the situations more than it hurts it. So what if people use it to try and make a buck... the consumer ALWAYS has the right to 1. disable the passing of the information and 2. to not buy from any medium which requires them to reveal more information than they are willing.
You seem to be saying that
although sites will try and abuse data collected via cookies,
it is in our best interests
not to block or delete these cookies
because we have the right to block them if we want (and therefore we shouldn't).
and also because we don't have to buy anything from a site that wants more info than we're comfortable giving. Although presumably from 2) it remains in our best interest to give over the info.
I feel sure I speak for a great many slashdotters when I say "You WHAT?"
I have a grocery card. It says I'm a 57 year old black woman named "Monica". Or at least it did, I've traded with other people several times. Dunno who's identity I'm shopping with now.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that? In practice the consumer benefits from the transaction more than the business. But, as is argued in the whitepaper in TFA, the consumer does not benefit in this case.
What in the name of CMOT Dibbler has the cost of hiring a secretary got to do with the inflated margin MS charge for office?
Do you have any idea what OS's used to cost before MS came out?
And this would relevant because...?
There are a lot of things not to like about MS, but I really don't think anyone can claim they've done anything but drive prices down to the point where computers are affordable for the masses.
I'm inlined to credit Moore's law for that one, personally. Perhaps you'd like to explain how this one works?
I do find it interesting that you see the only two alternatives as being Microsoft in it's current monopolistic form, or no Microsoft at all.
Personally I was thinking more along the lines of
You would seem to think that any such concession would inevitably lead to the destruction of the software giant. The only way I can see in which that might follow is if MS' offerings have become utterly debased and devoid of all value. A damning indictment coming from an apparent support of Microsoft. It's also somewhat further than I'd have been prepared to go myself.
You don't think you might be guilty of a touch of the old groupthink yourself, do you?
Astroturfing again, Bill?
And this is going to give what, precisely, that your passport does not? No one insists on a passport before they accept a cheque.
What does this governemt backed ID get you?
What purpose can it serve that your passport cannot?
I still haven't heard anything worth shelling out 100 quid for.
And yes, there are identity theft issues. And privacy ones. And issues of civil liberties. And they're still using it to hit us with yet another bloody tax. And they won't give straight answers to questions about the pestilent thing...
I did. Why didn't you?
No, really. Why didn't you?
all the Conservatives do now is try to copy Labour but out-do them.
I think they're a single political; party that split into two teams. They can take turns in power. Once you're in, the game is too see how much you can piss on the electorate before they rebel and let the other team continue your policies using new rhetoric.
Or to put it another way, Big Money has a hand each up the arses of Blair and Howard both. They face the camera and say "Gottle of Geer" and "That's the way to do it!" and whack each other over the head with the sausages while we try to decide which glove puppet best represents our interests.
And they have the nerve to describe this as "Democracy".
Alternatively, if you mean that ID cards will perform some useful anti-terrorist function, perhaps you might explain what that function is and how it will operate. I know a lot of us have been waiting for the government to address that very point.
I'm sure it does. Really. That wasn't mean to be taken at face value.
Ah, yes. You see, this is a common misconception in the IT world. A lot of otherwise intelligent people think that just because Microsoft are innovating from behind again, that means they should conform to whatever de facto standards may already have been established.
People are well aware of Microsoft's excellent track record in innovating with the ideas of others. So it is quite natural that when these people see a company like Google indulging in a spot of pre-emptive copying, they fall into the error of assuming that just because Microsoft came up with the idea second, that means they didn't do it first.
Once you disregard this spurious and distracting datum, it becomes clear that Google have the responsibility to conform to Microsoft's interface. It's really quite simple.
Oh, hang on a sec... :D
"Better for all concerned if you get your software from Microsoft, really. Safer too. I don't have to draw you a picture, do I guv?"
Which is roughly what Ballmer said at a trade conference at Asia, not so very long ago.
You were sarcastic, I returned the compliment.
I'm not mad keen on ads. Very few are. Internet ads tend to be needlessly intrusive and distracting. I see no reason to help someone craft ads I find even harder to ignore.
So what's your point?
I would be quite hapy with advertising that respects my time and property. No movement, no noise, no popups, nothing I find annoying or offensive.
But if that's too much to ask, and at the moment it seems that it is, then I'll make my personal web ad free until the advertisers get a clue.
I'll be the judge of that, thank you.
I would hope that whether they show you an ad or not really doesn't affect you. It's like not listening to an opposing argument because you're afraid that you might actually agree, because your argument/mind is too weak.
Sir, but I have better things to do than stand in one place 24/7 while every idiot in the world lines up to regale me, one by one, with the same brain dead arguments again and again.
You proceede from a false premise. I block advertisments that annoy me, that disrupt my concentration, and that waste my time.
Advertisments that fail to offend me are not blocked. This should serve the evolutionary purpose as allow the wetched things to waste my working time. Of course, agencies that persistently offend are blocked too. I trust this too will provide badly needed feedback into the system.
Heh, yeah.
I worry about first party cookies significantly less than I worry about using a credit card at a restaurant. After all, the waiter has more than enough time to copy your CC#, the security code on the back, your signature, /and/ the magstripe.
True. But you can disclaim the transaction. And if enough people do it the resauranteur ends up in court from the credit card people for fraud which is the main reason the system works.
On the other hand we have no way to monitor what happens with our tracking data. And given that I don't want it to exist in the first place...
If you jotted down your transaction ID, nope.
Hmmm... I think I'm happy to assume responsibility for keeping my transaction ids, just as I assume responsibiity for keeping my receipts.
That suggests another difference between your bricks-and-mortar shop and an internet outlet. The internet site has some failure modes that a human being doesn't have.
For instance, if a meatspace shopkeeper sells the business, he doesn't sit down with the new owner and describe every customer from memory: "About six-two, big coat and goggly eyes and a really long wooly scarf. Likes S/F". But if a cyberstore sells up, they pass on the data as part of the equity. Equally, the human shopkeeper doesn't get his brain hacked or stolen or retrieved from a dumpster after an upgrade. And with all those triple opt-in email addresses too...
>What do they do? Make it up the night before? Yuck!
Some of the ingredients, yes. Which is partly why I don't care for the other stuff they make:)
heheh. fair enough then :D
That's broadly true for web based sessions, but not for client/server in general. Quick example: imagine a client/server based flight sim. There's at least three ways you could write it:
-
Server stores the state: The client sends control signals and receives bitmaps for display. all the simulation is done
on the server.
-
Client stores the state: Client does all the simulation. All the server does is return map info. Requests are of the form: give me the view from map co-ordinate x,y at bearing 090, so the server is stateless.
-
Hybrid: client stores plane internal state (speed, height, fuel), server stores plane location. This works well for multiplayer games where the server needs to know where each player is, but detailed calculation can be better done on client machines.
That's being just a bit picky, I'll admit. Still, the point is that there's more to client/server than just webapps.So I said that the marketers should, rather than just whining, fund the development of the better UI. Now, what's wrong with any of that?
Nothing I can see. Although I am going to be looking with suspicion at any marketing specced UI, since what they call "functionality" I tend to call "spyware".
That said, there are a few firefox extensions that do pretty much what you want already. I can see you'd want to tweak the interface a bit given your target audience, but the basics are there. That and a bit of firefox evangelism...
That turns out not to be the case. The client state determines which requests get sent; the server doesn't care. Were you really unaware of this, or was it just your turn to be "so disingenuous as to be specious?"
Now, you've done some exaggeration of your own, really into a different category, with your distortion of my statement that marketers should do something to fix the problem, rather than just complain about it.
You said "change the false perception". That's very much a marketer's way of thinking.
Likewise with your projection of "morality" onto the "goodness" or "badness" of cookies
Um, your projection, not mine. I argued for their amorality. That's "amoral" as distinct from "immoral", yes?
Of course it has nothing to do with the "morality" of a technology
So you're agreeing with me, albeit in a highly contentious tone. Fair enough.
Most people will use more compex apps when they're more convenient than that, and need a better UI. That helps them distinguish between "tracking" and "history", which is a matter of their perception of their own privacy.
Perhaps it would help if you said what this UI had to be applied to. I've been assuming you meant bettre UIs for web apps, but perhaps you meant browsers.
But even if you did, I can't see what would stop the forces of darkness using "session history" cookies to store tracking data. To whatever limited extent they may differ in the first place.
Just complaining about it, like marketers do, isn't helping. Just shutting them off, which severely limits the features of the platform, is also inadequate.
Personally, I allow session cookies by default, and I can whitelist any site that can convince me they have a need to track my behavior between visits. The only one to come close there is google so I can store my prefs.
Within those parameters, I can't really see what you hope to achive. I'll grant people could do with a better understanding of what cookies do and why session cookies can be a good idea. But you've far from convinced me that there's a case for intersession cookies, or that there could be a way to discriminate between "session history" cookies and trackers.
So, I'm sorry but at the moment it just sounds like you're looking for a form of words that'll let marketers sneak tracking cookies in through the back door under the guise of session history. That's not an accusation BTW, just explaining how it sounds to me given my imperfect understanding of your aims.
But my client - my web browser - does have a persistent state. It knows exactly what state it's in, and doesn't need cookies to keep track of itself. Oh wait, let me guess, you meant a persistent client state accessable by the server?
Unfortunately, in that case, your statement simply isn't true. There are countless client/server applications that work perfectly well with a stateless server. I've designed a few of them myself.
Consider a web server and my browser. I can block cookies entirely And you know what? If I do that, the vast majority of web sites function just fine, thank you. I don't call that "unusably crippled".
Of course, there are some applications where the server needs knowledge of client state. And if you're trying to implement such a servive with a web architecure using a standard webserver, then it's not going to work with browsers that disable cookies.
Marketers could stop complaining, and fund better UIs that decrease the false perception that cookies are bad.
So attempt to change peoples perceptions rather than change the behavior that led to the problem. How very "marketing".
BTW, if the perception of cookies as "bad" is false, so is any perception that they are "good". Cookies are an amoral technology. It is only the use to which they are put that can be considered in terms of morality.
Their stealth makes them sinister, and their unmanageability makes people throw out the benign majority with the tiny malign minority.
Yet somehow, in the days before I blocked all bar session cookies, the persistent third party tracking cookies used to be far more prevalent than the sessions ones.
I think I have to dispute your proportions here.
Post a survey page. That's what people did the days before cookies.
Incidentally, what create what products? Most of the stores I visit are box shifters for other companies. Most of the sites I visit aren't even stores.
Yes, god forbid I get an ad telling me about something that might interest me.
Gosh yes. I just live for the opportunity to give you all the information you need to manipulate me more efficiently into buying more junk I don't need at every possible opportunity. Really, that's all I've ever wanted from a web site is better adverts. Hell, let's lose the content altogether and just have ads.
Makes you wonder why no one's written software to stop those nasty web pages covering all those nice popunder adverts, doesn't it?
Well, I don't think anyone is demanding they be outlawed. Just defending our right to block them.
I'm not sure how you arrived to those conclusions at all.
Well, it was the bit about
This set me to thinking "how does the ability to turn off cookies make them less harmfull if we always leave them on".It seems a bit like saying "your best policy is to keep your mouth shut because, after all, you have the right to free speech".
That's what I don't get.
Alas short-termism seems to be modern disease. Grab what you can and get out. After all, if revenues start dropping, they can always change the domain and the branding and start again, right?
It's a question of trust, and this is an area where trust has been abused.
And if you walk into my bookstore, I'll give you the same price as any random person. But if I know you like sci-fi, I'd be sure to mention that if you don't mind waiting to buy that book, next week we have a 20% off sale on sci-fi if we haven't put up the signs yet.
But if you haven't put up your signs, you didn't update your website, so you can't tell me anyway. unless you're proposing to spam me at a later date - in which case I don't want your cookies, thank you, or anything else you might have.
And if you come in with a book and say you'd like to return it, but you don't have a receipt, I'll give you the same store credit I give everyone else. But if I remember selling it to you, I'll give you a refund if you don't want anything else right now.
Yes, yes, yes. But this is the internet. I have a copy of the sales details and so should you. And I have a record of the credit card transaction. And so should you. So an honest trader is going to give me the refund anyway, so I don't need your cookie. Do I?
When I go get lunch from the local sandwich shop, I wait in line like everyone else, but I get my food faster because the staff knows me and doesn't have to ask what I want.
What, like you always have a tuna-and-sweetcorn bap?
They don't treat the other customers worse, they just don't know the other customers' habits.
What do they do? Make it up the night before? Yuck!
Seriously, this service could be offered with a subscription. which has the advantage that I know up front what's happening.
I think the GP disaproves more of the willful deception of the general public than than of unforseen uses being found for technology
You seem to be saying that
I feel sure I speak for a great many slashdotters when I say "You WHAT?"
I love it! I never thought of that :D