Kudos to NASA for having two sets of tools, one for each astronaut.... Wait... You say they only have those two sets? No backups?...
The article implies that they had two bags on the spacewalk. No saying how many more tools they had inside the space station. Never trust the summary alone.
Maybe you should try using some of those "crappy" closed-source drivers. I've found that when the manufacturer makes drivers for Linux (closed or open source) they usually work better than the third-party open source versions. Being closed source does not make something crappy any more than being open source makes something crappy.
Cedega is open source and you can even download the latest source from cvs but still transmeta is able to sell it.
I was curious about your example so I looked it up in wikipedia. This is what I found:
Cedega (formerly known as WineX) is TransGaming Technologies' proprietary fork of Wine . . . . . . Though Cedega is mainly proprietary software, Transgaming does make part of the source publicly available via CVS, under a mix of licenses.
Please explain how you make money selling something that others will inevitably give away (legally) for free. Sure, you can ask for donations, but generally that's not going to get you nearly as much as directly selling your product, if it even covers production costs.
You don't have the right to withdraw the code from distribution by anyone that already has a copy, and I don't think you have the right to remove your name from those copies, so what exactly do they imagine they would own?
I'm guessing you already answered that question:
* The right to release another version under a different license.
... without the minor restrictions of the BSD license. Namely, they wouldn't be legally required to credit him (or her) in their derived work. It's also possible he's done some work which hasn't been release yet. Also, from the sounds of it they're asking him to give up his own right to create derived works (via the non-compete agreement).
Hey man, you know the second amendment is guns and the first amendment is relgion/speech/press/assembly, right?
Oops. Of course I meant the first amendment. Maybe it's a good thing I'm not a politician. Bringing up gun rights when discussing religion could get me into all kinds of trouble.
Is it possible to both love someone and believe that s/he will spend an eternity in hell without doing everything in your power to convince them to convert? I'm not saying that the president would abuse his/her power, I'm simply saying that it seems inconsistent to me to say "I love you. And I will encourage you to worship according to your own conscience. And you're going to hell." One of the three has to be insincere.
You can't force anyone to heaven. The ONLY way they CAN get there is by worshiping according to their own conscience. So naturally, I would encourage them to worship according to their own conscience. The sibling post (to this one) commented that allow and encourage are not the same thing, but I like the word encourage better. And yes, I believe in doing everything in my power to help people willingly convert. In the case of president that involves doing everything in his/her power to ensure religious freedom. Anything that violates that would be counterproductive. Also note that I couldn't possibly know that any particular person was going to hell, so if I said it (which I never have or would), that would indeed be insincere.
I believe that all non-believers should be put to death. Irrelevant? I believe creationism is true and should be taught in schools. Irrelevant?
Let me qualify my original statement. Religious beliefs that are unrelated to policy or prejudice are irrelevant. So my religious beliefs that everyone should be free to worship according to their own conscience, would of course be relevant, as it indicates my lack of prejudice.
..and any response will offend some group of bigots...who believe differently.
Don't confuse "offended" with "in disagreement".
Don't confuse "some" with "all", and don't confuse bigots with people who believe differently. Also note that the "who believe differently" part was not redundant. Bigots who believe differently are fairly likely to be offended and thus vote against you (while those bigots who agree with you are also more likely to vote for you because they agree). Other people (those who are not bigots) who believe differently will be fair, and not vote against (or for) you simply because your religious beliefs are different than (or the same as) theirs.
If I were a candidate, and this question was posed to me:
BEGIN RESPONSE I believe that salvation comes in and through Jesus Christ. I also believe in a just God who will grant everyone an equal and adequate opportunity to obtain salvation. However, I do not see the relevance of this to my campaign.
How I view and interact with those of other religions, is important. My religion teaches, and I believe, that every man should be free to believe and worship according to their own conscience. Naturally, I support the second amendment to the Constitution. There are those who want to restrict the worship of others, in violation of the free exercise clause. There are also those who want to impose their form of worship on others, in violation of the establishment clause. I will do everything in my power to prevent such attempts. I am a firm believer in the right to worship as one sees fit, or if one so chooses, the right not to worship. And I would be willing to die defending those rights if it were necessary. END RESPONSE
Why should this question be difficult to answer? Of course a question about religious belief is inherently unfair, because it is irrelevant, and any response will offend some group of bigots (which could be atheist bigots, religious bigots, or possibly even agnostic bigots) who believe differently. Also, note that anyone who claims that my first paragraph is not in congruence with the Bible clearly does not understand it.
We just had a story on automatic bill pay where I voiced my support for credit cards over writing checks. This story supports that:
First, if someone defrauds your credit card, you're not liable. Dispute the charge and you're done, the onus is then on the merchant to prove the validity of the transaction. With cash accounts, once the money is gone, it's gone.
Simply false. If you dispute the payment within a reasonable amount of time, any reputable financial institution will refund you the money, no matter what the form of payment: check, credit card, whatever, even -- from personal experience -- ATM withdrawals where the wrong amount was dispensed. However, if you wait too long (including with credit cards) as is the case in this story, you're out of luck.
Second, checking accounts are difficult to reconcile as can be seen from the linked story. The person in question despite being financially sophisticated, was not able to be SURE about what his balance should be. Because the checks settle out of your account at the timing discretion of the recipient of the funds, it's not possible to say what your balance on any given day should be, which makes it hard to spot problems as they occur.
How does a credit card solve this problem? They don't usually clear instantly, you know. Debit cards are the only things I know that do that. His problem was that he had too many transactions to keep track of. If you have a reasonable amount of transactions, it's not a problem. Additionally, if you have checks with duplicates, it's easy to verify that each check that clears matches one you wrote out. However, credit cards and other electronic transfers require you to write everything down if you want to keep track of it. And the fraudulent transactions were electronic.
While the Guy (hah) in the article probably cannot avoid writing many checks due to his business, the fewer checks an individual writes the easier it is to keep track of one's balances. As long as you have the discipline to not abuse your credit card, it's the way to go.
Fewer transactions of any type makes it easier, but as previously mentioned checks can be the easiest form of payment to keep track of if you have duplicates.
Now regarding credit cards specifically, the idea that they're safer is a myth initiated by the credit card companies themselves. As already mentioned, you have the same fraud protection with any reasonable bank account as you do with a credit card (I think it's required by law in US, but not 100% sure). Also, credit card fraud requires only a 16-digit number, which isn't any different from a 9 digit routing number plus a 7 digit account number, except that the credit card number is probably easier to get a hold of and use (since they're used everywhere). If you're really worried about account security, use a debit card (which at least requires a secret pin and physical possession) or small quantities of cash for all your payments. But of course then you won't be able to do business with an awful lot of people.
That means that Microsoft has, for the very first time, invented something useful.
That may depend on what you mean by "Microsoft has".
From the article:
Anna Pyayt led the research as part of her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Washington in collaboration with two Microsoft engineers. Microsoft funded the work and has also applied for a patent on the technology.
So the title seems a little misleading. It seems to me that Anna Pyayt is the primary inventor, not the Microsoft engineers. So a more appropriate title might have been something like "University of Washington Student Invents Energy-Efficient LCD Competitor with Help from Microsoft."
You seem to have confused me with the author of the original post you replied to (the now great great grandparent). The MAIN point of my post was to inform people about where to find an article on the subject you referred to. The first part however was simply an attempt at humor (which probably failed), as I thought it was amusing when that was the type of results I found when I simply copied and pasted from your post into google. I realize now that it could have sounded like the original author trying to be defensive. Sorry to confuse you.
For starters, could you explain your solution to the Mach 5 problem? (No, I know you don't know what that is, I'm using it to illustrate my point, vis., that you are talking bollocks about something you know nothing about. Now go away and google and read for a few years.
Here's the explanation (google cached) of the "Mach 5 problem" I found on Google (which really does appear to be unresolved):
Motu Mach 5 problem with Logic 7
Nov 19 2006, 12:06 AM hi i recently did a re installation of the mach 5 on my G5 computer running the latest version of logic 7. it loaded up fine and asked me to specify a location for the mach 5 sounds folder which i did. however i am getting an error message . . .
Hmm... what does that have to do with mars?
Ah... you're probably referring to the problem described in this result, which consists of quotes from this article.
Certainly wouldn't seem to be a well known topic for the general populace. Without quotes in the google search I didn't even get any relevant results in the first page (although adding the word "Mars" might have helped).
It is about as naive as those peopel who claim you can never know anything with 100% certainty. If that was the case then we certainly couldn't know it ( at least not for sure ), and thus it falls over on itself.
If we can't be 100% certain that doesn't mean we can't be 99% or even 99.99999999999999999999999999999% certain (at which point the uncertainty is probably negligible). I'm almost 100% certain of that.:)
Furthermore: My desk can't know anything at all. And if that's true, it can't know that it can't know anything at all. That's clearly no paradox however. It's lack of knowing it does not make it false. Likewise our lack of being 100% certain that we can't be 100% certain of anything doesn't make that false either (or true for that matter). Being 100% certain of that would be a paradox, but who in their right mind would assert (and mean it) that they are 100% certain that they can't be 100% certain of anything? Some may say they're almost 100% certain maybe, but not fully 100% certain.
Hmm... this discussion reminded me of a saying I've considered using as my sig before, and I think change to it, at least for a couple days.
So in under three hours I had a secure, working system with Ubuntu. That includes the video, WiFi, and Intel chipset support.
Well, with my existing hardware, I could probably do that too. I already found the solutions to all my driver issues (except my printer which I have yet to get working properly under Linux), and that's usually the hard part. If you're fortunate enough to not have any weird driver issues, or if you've seen them (and solved them) before, it's not really a problem.
How did you manage to get Windows to be functional in under an hour?
Just a simple misunderstanding here. I get the drivers, not the whole OS, working in under an hour. That's after having already installed the OS, but before doing most of my tweaking and software installation.
Linux takes a fraction of the time as Windows to get it fine tuned? What world do you live on? Just getting drivers working properly can often take weeks of research and experimentation (assuming there's a driver that will work). And yes, that's even true for Ubuntu. In my experience with Windows getting the drivers working properly has never taken more than a few minutes (except once for a printer for which there was no 64-bit driver). And just so you know, I do prefer Linux once I've gotten everything working properly, I just hate the getting everything working stage.
I also wonder if larger monitors are contributing to eyestrain - more eye movement is needed. I have a 15" LCD, equivalent in size to a 17" CRT which was considered something of a luxury when I first got one. Many people would complain about it being too small - but I notice that my monitor is almost exactly the same size as my open copy of a random book, O'Reilly's "Web Services Essentials". I think there are good reasons why books evolved to the page size that they did.
The large size of the monitor isn't the problem, it's that people think the text needs to extend from one end of the screen to the other. That just makes things harder to read and wastes valuable monitor space (which I consider to be more akin to desk space than to page space). After reading your post, I put a standard sheet of paper up to my 22" wide-screen monitor and found that with my current browser size (which is typical for me), the width of the text on the page was just short of the paper's width.
I bought this monitor more for gaming and movies, but personally, I think this is the best monitor for coding I've ever used. I use roughly 3/5 of the screen width for my IDE, and use the remaining space for other useful programs, usually including a console or two for looking up man/info pages and performing other simple tasks. That way, I don't have to alt-tab every time I want to look at another program (particularly for reference information). It's similar to the way other people use multiple monitors, but I think I prefer a single wide monitor for such tasks over two smaller monitors.
They did a lot of work on automatically converting code to parallel in the compiler and were quite successful at what they did. Trying to do it manually is the wrong approach.
This works great for some easily parallelized algorithms (such as graphics). For those algorithms, doing it manually may be the wrong approach, however, too many algorithms cannot gain much from current automagic parallelization methods. You really have to do it manually. A good example of this is minimax (alpha-beta, PVS, etc) game tree searching, due to its recursive nature.
"Discrete Mathematics" by Richard Johnsonbaugh. Fifth Edition. ISBN: 0-13-089008-1 This textbook (from 2001) has a small section called "The RSA Public-Key Cryptosystem." It teaches you enough to be able to do simple RSA encryption, but I'm certain it's missing important implementation details. If you really wanted to know about encryption, I'd suggest something that goes into more depth. I've never really looked into encryption much myself.
We have representation in the WTO, both in setting it up and each round of talks. We also had full representation during the judgments that went against us. So when do I get to vote for these representatives? Sorry, they're not exactly my representatives they're representatives of my government. If I don't have some kind of direct say in choosing the representative, I have a hard time considering that full representation. Choosing some of the people who choose the representative is not enough. And for all I know there may be even more middle-men in the selection process.
Broken components have nothing to do with the buyer, and incompatible components that theoretically should be compatible means that one of the components (perhaps not the new one) has a broken design. I have run into incompatibilities that I should have noticed, but beforehand but these are rare. Incompatibilities do to flawed design are also rare but can lead to many returns of the same type of product and have nothing to do with purchaser ignorance. DOA or otherwise broken items are, however, all too common, and we MUST be able to return these items. In fact, they're legally required to accept these returns.
You obviously don't by computer parts much. A limit on returns for computer parts would be horrible, and I wouldn't buy from any store that did such a thing. Anytime I build a computer I expect to be returning parts that just don't work or turn out to be incompatible with other parts. I once tried three different graphics cards of the same model before determining that it must not be compatible with the motherboard even though it should have been.
Also, any limit on returns (the way I see it) would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. If they sell defective products they are legally required to refund or exchange them, regardless of how many defective products they've sold to a particular customer.
Slashdot Mirror
Kudos to NASA for having two sets of tools, one for each astronaut. ... Wait... You say they only have those two sets? No backups? ...
The article implies that they had two bags on the spacewalk. No saying how many more tools they had inside the space station. Never trust the summary alone.
Maybe you should try using some of those "crappy" closed-source drivers. I've found that when the manufacturer makes drivers for Linux (closed or open source) they usually work better than the third-party open source versions. Being closed source does not make something crappy any more than being open source makes something crappy.
Cedega is open source and you can even download the latest source from cvs but still transmeta is able to sell it.
I was curious about your example so I looked it up in wikipedia. This is what I found:
Cedega (formerly known as WineX) is TransGaming Technologies' proprietary fork of Wine . . .
. . .
Though Cedega is mainly proprietary software, Transgaming does make part of the source publicly available via CVS, under a mix of licenses.
Also note that the company is Transgaming, not Transmeta.
Please explain how you make money selling something that others will inevitably give away (legally) for free. Sure, you can ask for donations, but generally that's not going to get you nearly as much as directly selling your product, if it even covers production costs.
You don't have the right to withdraw the code from distribution by anyone that already has a copy, and I don't think you have the right to remove your name from those copies, so what exactly do they imagine they would own?
I'm guessing you already answered that question:
* The right to release another version under a different license.
... without the minor restrictions of the BSD license. Namely, they wouldn't be legally required to credit him (or her) in their derived work. It's also possible he's done some work which hasn't been release yet. Also, from the sounds of it they're asking him to give up his own right to create derived works (via the non-compete agreement).
You mean there's something Biden and I agree on?
Hey man, you know the second amendment is guns and the first amendment is relgion/speech/press/assembly, right?
Oops. Of course I meant the first amendment. Maybe it's a good thing I'm not a politician. Bringing up gun rights when discussing religion could get me into all kinds of trouble.
Is it possible to both love someone and believe that s/he will spend an eternity in hell without doing everything in your power to convince them to convert? I'm not saying that the president would abuse his/her power, I'm simply saying that it seems inconsistent to me to say "I love you. And I will encourage you to worship according to your own conscience. And you're going to hell." One of the three has to be insincere.
You can't force anyone to heaven. The ONLY way they CAN get there is by worshiping according to their own conscience. So naturally, I would encourage them to worship according to their own conscience. The sibling post (to this one) commented that allow and encourage are not the same thing, but I like the word encourage better. And yes, I believe in doing everything in my power to help people willingly convert. In the case of president that involves doing everything in his/her power to ensure religious freedom. Anything that violates that would be counterproductive. Also note that I couldn't possibly know that any particular person was going to hell, so if I said it (which I never have or would), that would indeed be insincere.
I believe that all non-believers should be put to death. Irrelevant? I believe creationism is true and should be taught in schools. Irrelevant?
Let me qualify my original statement. Religious beliefs that are unrelated to policy or prejudice are irrelevant. So my religious beliefs that everyone should be free to worship according to their own conscience, would of course be relevant, as it indicates my lack of prejudice.
..and any response will offend some group of bigots...who believe differently.
Don't confuse "offended" with "in disagreement".
Don't confuse "some" with "all", and don't confuse bigots with people who believe differently. Also note that the "who believe differently" part was not redundant. Bigots who believe differently are fairly likely to be offended and thus vote against you (while those bigots who agree with you are also more likely to vote for you because they agree). Other people (those who are not bigots) who believe differently will be fair, and not vote against (or for) you simply because your religious beliefs are different than (or the same as) theirs.
If I were a candidate, and this question was posed to me:
BEGIN RESPONSE
I believe that salvation comes in and through Jesus Christ. I also believe in a just God who will grant everyone an equal and adequate opportunity to obtain salvation. However, I do not see the relevance of this to my campaign.
How I view and interact with those of other religions, is important. My religion teaches, and I believe, that every man should be free to believe and worship according to their own conscience. Naturally, I support the second amendment to the Constitution. There are those who want to restrict the worship of others, in violation of the free exercise clause. There are also those who want to impose their form of worship on others, in violation of the establishment clause. I will do everything in my power to prevent such attempts. I am a firm believer in the right to worship as one sees fit, or if one so chooses, the right not to worship. And I would be willing to die defending those rights if it were necessary.
END RESPONSE
Why should this question be difficult to answer? Of course a question about religious belief is inherently unfair, because it is irrelevant, and any response will offend some group of bigots (which could be atheist bigots, religious bigots, or possibly even agnostic bigots) who believe differently.
Also, note that anyone who claims that my first paragraph is not in congruence with the Bible clearly does not understand it.
Simply false. If you dispute the payment within a reasonable amount of time, any reputable financial institution will refund you the money, no matter what the form of payment: check, credit card, whatever, even -- from personal experience -- ATM withdrawals where the wrong amount was dispensed. However, if you wait too long (including with credit cards) as is the case in this story, you're out of luck.
How does a credit card solve this problem? They don't usually clear instantly, you know. Debit cards are the only things I know that do that. His problem was that he had too many transactions to keep track of. If you have a reasonable amount of transactions, it's not a problem. Additionally, if you have checks with duplicates, it's easy to verify that each check that clears matches one you wrote out. However, credit cards and other electronic transfers require you to write everything down if you want to keep track of it. And the fraudulent transactions were electronic.
Fewer transactions of any type makes it easier, but as previously mentioned checks can be the easiest form of payment to keep track of if you have duplicates.
Now regarding credit cards specifically, the idea that they're safer is a myth initiated by the credit card companies themselves. As already mentioned, you have the same fraud protection with any reasonable bank account as you do with a credit card (I think it's required by law in US, but not 100% sure). Also, credit card fraud requires only a 16-digit number, which isn't any different from a 9 digit routing number plus a 7 digit account number, except that the credit card number is probably easier to get a hold of and use (since they're used everywhere). If you're really worried about account security, use a debit card (which at least requires a secret pin and physical possession) or small quantities of cash for all your payments. But of course then you won't be able to do business with an awful lot of people.
Personally, I'd consider that a feature.
That means that Microsoft has, for the very first time, invented something useful.
That may depend on what you mean by "Microsoft has".
From the article:
Anna Pyayt led the research as part of her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Washington in collaboration with two Microsoft engineers. Microsoft funded the work and has also applied for a patent on the technology.
So the title seems a little misleading. It seems to me that Anna Pyayt is the primary inventor, not the Microsoft engineers. So a more appropriate title might have been something like "University of Washington Student Invents Energy-Efficient LCD Competitor with Help from Microsoft."
http://space.jaxa.jp/movie/20071113_kaguya_movie01_e.html
As I said, your . . .
You seem to have confused me with the author of the original post you replied to (the now great great grandparent). The MAIN point of my post was to inform people about where to find an article on the subject you referred to. The first part however was simply an attempt at humor (which probably failed), as I thought it was amusing when that was the type of results I found when I simply copied and pasted from your post into google. I realize now that it could have sounded like the original author trying to be defensive. Sorry to confuse you.
For starters, could you explain your solution to the Mach 5 problem? (No, I know you don't know what that is, I'm using it to illustrate my point, vis., that you are talking bollocks about something you know nothing about. Now go away and google and read for a few years.
Here's the explanation (google cached) of the "Mach 5 problem" I found on Google (which really does appear to be unresolved):
Hmm... what does that have to do with mars?
Ah... you're probably referring to the problem described in this result, which consists of quotes from this article.
Certainly wouldn't seem to be a well known topic for the general populace. Without quotes in the google search I didn't even get any relevant results in the first page (although adding the word "Mars" might have helped).
It is about as naive as those peopel who claim you can never know anything with 100% certainty. If that was the case then we certainly couldn't know it ( at least not for sure ), and thus it falls over on itself.
If we can't be 100% certain that doesn't mean we can't be 99% or even 99.99999999999999999999999999999% certain (at which point the uncertainty is probably negligible). I'm almost 100% certain of that. :)
Furthermore: My desk can't know anything at all. And if that's true, it can't know that it can't know anything at all. That's clearly no paradox however. It's lack of knowing it does not make it false. Likewise our lack of being 100% certain that we can't be 100% certain of anything doesn't make that false either (or true for that matter). Being 100% certain of that would be a paradox, but who in their right mind would assert (and mean it) that they are 100% certain that they can't be 100% certain of anything? Some may say they're almost 100% certain maybe, but not fully 100% certain.
Hmm... this discussion reminded me of a saying I've considered using as my sig before, and I think change to it, at least for a couple days.
So in under three hours I had a secure, working system with Ubuntu.
That includes the video, WiFi, and Intel chipset support.
Well, with my existing hardware, I could probably do that too. I already found the solutions to all my driver issues (except my printer which I have yet to get working properly under Linux), and that's usually the hard part. If you're fortunate enough to not have any weird driver issues, or if you've seen them (and solved them) before, it's not really a problem.
How did you manage to get Windows to be functional in under an hour?
Just a simple misunderstanding here. I get the drivers, not the whole OS, working in under an hour. That's after having already installed the OS, but before doing most of my tweaking and software installation.
Linux takes a fraction of the time as Windows to get it fine tuned? What world do you live on? Just getting drivers working properly can often take weeks of research and experimentation (assuming there's a driver that will work). And yes, that's even true for Ubuntu. In my experience with Windows getting the drivers working properly has never taken more than a few minutes (except once for a printer for which there was no 64-bit driver). And just so you know, I do prefer Linux once I've gotten everything working properly, I just hate the getting everything working stage.
I also wonder if larger monitors are contributing to eyestrain - more eye movement is needed. I have a 15" LCD, equivalent in size to a 17" CRT which was considered something of a luxury when I first got one. Many people would complain about it being too small - but I notice that my monitor is almost exactly the same size as my open copy of a random book, O'Reilly's "Web Services Essentials". I think there are good reasons why books evolved to the page size that they did.
The large size of the monitor isn't the problem, it's that people think the text needs to extend from one end of the screen to the other. That just makes things harder to read and wastes valuable monitor space (which I consider to be more akin to desk space than to page space). After reading your post, I put a standard sheet of paper up to my 22" wide-screen monitor and found that with my current browser size (which is typical for me), the width of the text on the page was just short of the paper's width.
I bought this monitor more for gaming and movies, but personally, I think this is the best monitor for coding I've ever used. I use roughly 3/5 of the screen width for my IDE, and use the remaining space for other useful programs, usually including a console or two for looking up man/info pages and performing other simple tasks. That way, I don't have to alt-tab every time I want to look at another program (particularly for reference information). It's similar to the way other people use multiple monitors, but I think I prefer a single wide monitor for such tasks over two smaller monitors.
They did a lot of work on automatically converting code to parallel in the compiler and were quite successful at what they did. Trying to do it manually is the wrong approach.
This works great for some easily parallelized algorithms (such as graphics). For those algorithms, doing it manually may be the wrong approach, however, too many algorithms cannot gain much from current automagic parallelization methods. You really have to do it manually. A good example of this is minimax (alpha-beta, PVS, etc) game tree searching, due to its recursive nature.
Ah, but what about when P approaches 0 and N approaches infinity? I didn't see that in your article. No million dollar prize for you.
"Discrete Mathematics" by Richard Johnsonbaugh. Fifth Edition. ISBN: 0-13-089008-1
This textbook (from 2001) has a small section called "The RSA Public-Key Cryptosystem." It teaches you enough to be able to do simple RSA encryption, but I'm certain it's missing important implementation details. If you really wanted to know about encryption, I'd suggest something that goes into more depth. I've never really looked into encryption much myself.
Broken components have nothing to do with the buyer, and incompatible components that theoretically should be compatible means that one of the components (perhaps not the new one) has a broken design. I have run into incompatibilities that I should have noticed, but beforehand but these are rare. Incompatibilities do to flawed design are also rare but can lead to many returns of the same type of product and have nothing to do with purchaser ignorance. DOA or otherwise broken items are, however, all too common, and we MUST be able to return these items. In fact, they're legally required to accept these returns.
You obviously don't by computer parts much. A limit on returns for computer parts would be horrible, and I wouldn't buy from any store that did such a thing. Anytime I build a computer I expect to be returning parts that just don't work or turn out to be incompatible with other parts. I once tried three different graphics cards of the same model before determining that it must not be compatible with the motherboard even though it should have been.
Also, any limit on returns (the way I see it) would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. If they sell defective products they are legally required to refund or exchange them, regardless of how many defective products they've sold to a particular customer.