Funny that this is now in the news. Last October my son called me. He had purchased an Asus router for his mother at Best Buy, and when he got it to her house, it simply would not work - he could not connect to the router's interface, and the computer connected to it was not receiving an IP address via DHCP. He's set up several routers before, so it's not like it's the first time he's ever done this.
His receipt actually contained the words, "As a mind Best Buy Elite member, we are pleased to extend your return and exchange period on eligible products to 30 days from purchase date."
When he went to return it to Best Buy, only about an hour and a half after he had purchased it, and WITH his receipt, a message popped up on the register saying he would no longer be allowed to return items to Best Buy (they did give him a refund for the defective router, though).
A copy of the notice they gave him can be seen at http://tinypic.com/r/20gikno/9 . Apparently they required him to sign a copy of this, which they retained, as a condition of getting the refund.
When they did this, he was pretty upset about it because he was returning a defective product that he had just purchased, WITH a receipt, and the transaction (both sale and refund) was made with a Best Buy credit card. And, he told me that it had been probably about a year since the last time he returned anything to Best Buy.
When they sprang this on him, his response was predictable, he informed the clerk that he would never
again make a purchase at Best Buy and that they would probably be joining the long list of companies that are going out of business (my words, not his, but that's the gist of what he said).
My son says he can't remember ever returning anything to Best Buy without a receipt.
So, I went online and found this thread, which showed that his experience was not unique: BANNED FROM RETURNING OR EXCHANGING ITEMS FOR 365 DAYS AND I AM AN ELITE MEMBER!!!! (Sorry I had to use a TinyURL link, for some reason when I included the full link it went to a "Page Not Found" error. The link is to a thread on the Best Buy support site.)
I understand that the point of this is to prevent people from shoplifting items and then returning them without receipts, and I have no problem with that. But why is Best Buy using it against customers who have a receipt and may need to return a defective item? Something seems clearly wrong about the way this is being implemented.
So, we have this company that no one has ever heard of making decisions on whether customers are allowed to return items (despite what the store's published return policy may be). And they are even flagging honest customers that only return items they have purchased (and have a receipt for).
If you read that thread, my son is not the only person that this has happened to, and Best Buy doesn't seem to care, preferring to pass the buck to this TRE outfit.
I wonder if it is illegal for them to deny a return, if their published policies indicate that you can return something with a receipt for a certain number of days, and you have your receipt and are within the return period? I know that in this case my son signed that notice in order to get a refund, but he did it because they more or less twisted his arm - if he hadn't signed it, he'd have been stuck with a defective router and no refund.
To me it sounds like this TRE company that nobody's ever heard of is making decisions about whether a store can ignore its own return policies for certain customers that it has flagged. And it sounds like perhaps it's doing this at multiple stores, so if you get flagged at one store you may have a problem making a valid return to another. They do appear to have a some process where you can call them and more or less beg to be taken off their list (I have to wonder if people with Middle American accents get removed a lot quicker than people with strong ethnic ac
These companies are not nearly as big a threat as the companies with actual monopolies or duopolies where there are no viable competitive options for most of their customers. In my opinion, if we are going to break up any company, we should start with Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, and then work our way down the list to all the other cable/broadband/phone companies that have defacto monopolies. You know, the ones that basically bought out the FCC and got Net Neutrality repealed. In my opinion these are the companies that are most dangerous to the American way of life. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook got so big by giving people what they want, whereas the cable industry got so big by mostly giving people what the cable industry wanted to offer, which had very little to do with what their customers wanted. This professor is concentrating on the whales but totally ignoring the sharks.
I haven't actually tried it because when you go to install it, it says that it requires your permission to access your data on all websites, and since I'm not really certain how Firefox extension permissions work, I don't know if that actually implies some kind of security risk.
If you read the comments a lot of people are berating the author because it won't open bookmarks in new tabs, but that can easily be accomplished by adding a Firefox preference; you don't need an extension for that anymore. http://techdows.com/2017/09/fi...
Far and away the one I miss the most is Tab Mix Plus. While you can use scripts and in some cases about:chrome preferences (such as http://techdows.com/2017/09/fi...) to get some functionality back, it was a whole lot easier to just set all your preferences in Tab Mix Plus.
The other one was Classic Theme Restorer. While some of that functionality can be obtained using CustomCSSforFx (https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/releases/tag/1.3.0) it's a far more messy and manual process, and the options aren't all that well explained.
I have installed Waterfox (https://www.waterfoxproject.org/), which allows me to use almost all my old extensions, but I'm a little afraid of it since I know nothing about the developers or how seriously they take security. But for now, it's definitely an option for people who hate Firefox 57 and just want to get the use of their legacy extensions back. If as many people are upset about losing the use of extensions we've been using for nearly a decade (in some cases) as I am, Waterfox just MIGHT get a lot more popular. It would be interesting to know if their download count has suddenly skyrocketed. If you install Waterfox BEFORE updating to Firefox 57 and then have it copy all your settings from Firefox, it will look almost exactly like Firefox. Not all addon settings get copied, though (the addon itself gets copied, but not all the settings do for some addons), so you may have to change some of them by hand.
Wonderful post, but you forgot perhaps the best thing about BASIC - the commands were actually mnemonic. If you had a memory that was something akin to a sieve with a Teflon coating, you could still remember enough of the BASIC language to do something useful in it. I first learned BASIC using a friend's account on a DEC PDP-10 timeshare system (he kept insisting I should learn Fortran, because he said that would be the language of the future!), then on a TRS-80 Model 1, and then using QBASIC under MS-DOS. Now I have an OS X system but I still keep a copy of QBASIC tucked away, that I run under a MSDOS emulator on the rare occasion that I need to get something done quickly.
I've been told that everything you can do in BASIC you can do in Perl. But I have tried to learn Perl, and to me it seems incredibly difficult compared to BASIC. I've written a few short things in Perl, but every time I have I've had to go to some Perl resource and ask for help, because nothing is intuitive. And I always think about how easy it would be to write the same program in BASIC.
You can push the languages that "real programmers" use until you are blue in the face but they will never do what BASIC did, which was make it possible for everyone to be a programmer. Small business owners were writing code, or getting their 14 -year-old kids to write code, that would do simple things like print invoices. And the neat thing was that it would be written in a way that the business owner could understand how to use it. No thrusting off an expensive accounting package, where you had to take night classes to even know how to use the thing, and the program would not contain 1,000 features that would never be used. Instead the business owner got just what was needed to do the job, no more and no less, and if something changed they could fix the code themselves.
I think the real reason that there is so much hostility toward "beginner's" languages is that it comes from people who want programming to be obtuse. Just as auto mechanics love it when cars become so complex that "shadetree mechanics" can no longer work on them, "expert" (read: snooty) programmers that make a living writing code do not want people to have access to a language that's easy to remember, and easy to write code in. Now I understand that such languages have their limitations, and there are times when the use of a more advanced language is the only thing that will do. But for many simple tasks, particularly those involving the manipulation of data, BASIC will work just fine. It may not be the fastest language in the world, but if it's a choice between writing and debugging the code in a couple hours rather than a couple frustrating weeks, and being able to figure out the bugs myself rather than having to go on a forum and getting some obtuse piece of code I have no hope of deciphering (if I'm lucky and aren't ignored completely), I'd choose BASIC every time.
A couple of years ago I had to write a program to do some manipulation of TV schedule data for a PVR backend system, in order to get it into the XML format that the backend program understands. I tried Perl but was getting nowhere with it, then it occurred to me to see if there was any way I could use BASIC. I found FreeBASIC, installed it and wrote my program in BASIC, and in one evening I had it up and running, and I'm still using it two years later. I've need to make minor tweaks once or twice (due to changes in the source data) and in both cases I could do them; I didn't need to wait for someone else to fix the program for me. You have no idea how empowering that is.
The tl;dr version is that for many people, a "beginner's" language is all they will ever need to get their real-world tasks done, particularly if those tasks involve simple data manipulation, and BASIC had the added advantage of having easy-to-remember commands and statements. For those of you who have experience with PBX software, Asterisk's dialplan language is in many ways similar to BASIC, while FreeSWITCH's dial
I am one of those people who almost always gets my rebate, although I agree that the #1 thing you have to do is call about it when it is past the due date. And, you MUST make copies of EVERYTHING you send. Also, save a copy of the store ad showing the offer on the item, especially if you think there's any chance the store is promising more than what the rebate fulfillment center will deliver.
Now once in a blue moon, I've had a company try to deny a rebate for some reason. For example, once on a CD-R they tried to tell me I had not sent the UPC (I had a scanned copy of the UPC I had cut out of the box). This was on a name-brand CD-R from a large chain office supply store and I was talking to the chain's rebate center. I said, "I have a copy of everything I mailed in, including the UPC. I would be happy to send you a copy but you should realize that if I do, I'll also be sending a copy to my state's attorney general's office, naming the store in my complaint. (Please note they had already denied my rebate, I would not do that if they simply requested a copy of the submission, but at that point they were trying to stonewall me). So the person on the other end put me on hold for a moment, came back and said, "Mr. *****, we see by your records that you are a good customer of [the office supply chain] so we will go ahead and process your rebate."
If a rebate center denies the claim and can't be budged, I go back to the store with copies in hand and ask the manager to pay the rebate (usually they will if you either have a denial postcard, or it's been about six months and all you've gotten is the runaround - but there may been a reason for that which is peculiar to my state, which I will get to in a moment). Of course certain stores may not be willing to do this, but others are.
By the way, those online rebate forms that some companies are starting to use protect YOU against spelling errors in your name or address. I know it's easier to fill out the paper coupon, but when you do it online they have NO excuse for getting your name or address wrong.
One other thing to think about. If you are deaf, you may not have a voice telephone. If you live in a shared living situation, you may not have a phone of your own. In either case, you *usually* can note that on the form where they ask for a phone number. It is not a requirement to have a telephone in order to get a rebate, unless it says that it is on the form. If you leave the "Phone Number" line blank, that is an incomplete form and they may reject it for that reason. But if you are deaf and put "deaf - no voice telephone", or if you are living with someone else, have no phone of your own and simply put down "no phone", you have put something on that line and now your form is not incomplete. If you have doubts (and are in the latter situation), call the toll-free number on the form and ask what to put on the line if you have no phone - usually they will tell you that "no phone" is fine (of course you should do that BEFORE you cut out the UPC).
(Which reminds me, always make cutting out the UPC the LAST thing you do, that way if the rebate is screwed up in some way you will know while you can still return the item. I have returned items once or twice in the past simply because the rebate form was too ambiguous or complicated to complete).
Now, here is part of why I think I do so well. For one thing I have the persistence of a bulldog once the rebate is about a month overdue - I call back at least every 30 days and I don't take "no" for an answer (you tell me I won't get my rebate and both you and the store will be named in a complaint to my state attorney general).
The other thing is that I live in a state where the attorney general's office takes consumer protection seriously. They have an online complaint form which makes filing a complaint easy, and they do follow up on such complaints, and they do fine businesses that are repeat violators (and it isn't just a slap on the wrist, either). So any time I've
Wasn't this invented in the US about 70 years ago?
on
Gas Goes Solid
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· Score: 1
I remember the story, it was even fictionalized for one of the old sci-fi shows, maybe the original Outer Limits? But I had heard the story from my dad before that show ever aired. Basically, some guy walked into the U.S. patent office (back in the day when you could actually just show up with invention in hand) with an internal combustion engine (a minature automobile engine, or something similar) with an empty gas tank, and some pellets. When it was his turn to be seen, he showed that the tank was empty, put in a pellet, added plain water, and started the engine. The patent examiners told him to wait in an outside office for a few minutes while they discussed the matter among themselves. When they went back into the outer office to get the inventor, he had simply vanished, along with his engine and pellets. Vanished without a trace, it was as though he'd never existed at all.
I have no idea where my dad first heard the story be he told it to me when I was quite young - I think he may have read it in a magazine or something. I remember when they showed it on the original Outer Limits (on our old black and white TV), he couldn't believe they were showing the story on TV, but of course everyone took that to be pure fiction.
I'd be curious to know if there was any truth to the story - my dad seemed to believe it (I think he thought maybe one of the oil companies had something to do with the guy's disappearance) but for all I know it could have been WWII-era urban legend.
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Funny that this is now in the news. Last October my son called me. He had purchased an Asus router for his mother at Best Buy, and when he got it to her house, it simply would not work - he could not connect to the router's interface, and the computer connected to it was not receiving an IP address via DHCP. He's set up several routers before, so it's not like it's the first time he's ever done this.
His receipt actually contained the words, "As a mind Best Buy Elite member, we are pleased to extend your return and exchange period on eligible products to 30 days from purchase date."
When he went to return it to Best Buy, only about an hour and a half after he had purchased it, and WITH his receipt, a message popped up on the register saying he would no longer be allowed to return items to Best Buy (they did give him a refund for the defective router, though).
A copy of the notice they gave him can be seen at http://tinypic.com/r/20gikno/9 . Apparently they required him to sign a copy of this, which they retained, as a condition of getting the refund.
When they did this, he was pretty upset about it because he was returning a defective product that he had just purchased, WITH a receipt, and the transaction (both sale and refund) was made with a Best Buy credit card. And, he told me that it had been probably about a year since the last time he returned anything to Best Buy.
When they sprang this on him, his response was predictable, he informed the clerk that he would never again make a purchase at Best Buy and that they would probably be joining the long list of companies that are going out of business (my words, not his, but that's the gist of what he said).
My son says he can't remember ever returning anything to Best Buy without a receipt.
So, I went online and found this thread, which showed that his experience was not unique: BANNED FROM RETURNING OR EXCHANGING ITEMS FOR 365 DAYS AND I AM AN ELITE MEMBER!!!! (Sorry I had to use a TinyURL link, for some reason when I included the full link it went to a "Page Not Found" error. The link is to a thread on the Best Buy support site.)
I understand that the point of this is to prevent people from shoplifting items and then returning them without receipts, and I have no problem with that. But why is Best Buy using it against customers who have a receipt and may need to return a defective item? Something seems clearly wrong about the way this is being implemented.
So, we have this company that no one has ever heard of making decisions on whether customers are allowed to return items (despite what the store's published return policy may be). And they are even flagging honest customers that only return items they have purchased (and have a receipt for).
If you read that thread, my son is not the only person that this has happened to, and Best Buy doesn't seem to care, preferring to pass the buck to this TRE outfit.
I wonder if it is illegal for them to deny a return, if their published policies indicate that you can return something with a receipt for a certain number of days, and you have your receipt and are within the return period? I know that in this case my son signed that notice in order to get a refund, but he did it because they more or less twisted his arm - if he hadn't signed it, he'd have been stuck with a defective router and no refund.
To me it sounds like this TRE company that nobody's ever heard of is making decisions about whether a store can ignore its own return policies for certain customers that it has flagged. And it sounds like perhaps it's doing this at multiple stores, so if you get flagged at one store you may have a problem making a valid return to another. They do appear to have a some process where you can call them and more or less beg to be taken off their list (I have to wonder if people with Middle American accents get removed a lot quicker than people with strong ethnic ac
These companies are not nearly as big a threat as the companies with actual monopolies or duopolies where there are no viable competitive options for most of their customers. In my opinion, if we are going to break up any company, we should start with Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, and then work our way down the list to all the other cable/broadband/phone companies that have defacto monopolies. You know, the ones that basically bought out the FCC and got Net Neutrality repealed. In my opinion these are the companies that are most dangerous to the American way of life. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook got so big by giving people what they want, whereas the cable industry got so big by mostly giving people what the cable industry wanted to offer, which had very little to do with what their customers wanted. This professor is concentrating on the whales but totally ignoring the sharks.
Also, just found one more extension that may help Tab Mix Plus users:
Open Link with New Tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
I haven't actually tried it because when you go to install it, it says that it requires your permission to access your data on all websites, and since I'm not really certain how Firefox extension permissions work, I don't know if that actually implies some kind of security risk.
If you read the comments a lot of people are berating the author because it won't open bookmarks in new tabs, but that can easily be accomplished by adding a Firefox preference; you don't need an extension for that anymore. http://techdows.com/2017/09/fi...
Far and away the one I miss the most is Tab Mix Plus. While you can use scripts and in some cases about:chrome preferences (such as http://techdows.com/2017/09/fi...) to get some functionality back, it was a whole lot easier to just set all your preferences in Tab Mix Plus.
The other one was Classic Theme Restorer. While some of that functionality can be obtained using CustomCSSforFx (https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/releases/tag/1.3.0) it's a far more messy and manual process, and the options aren't all that well explained.
I have installed Waterfox (https://www.waterfoxproject.org/), which allows me to use almost all my old extensions, but I'm a little afraid of it since I know nothing about the developers or how seriously they take security. But for now, it's definitely an option for people who hate Firefox 57 and just want to get the use of their legacy extensions back. If as many people are upset about losing the use of extensions we've been using for nearly a decade (in some cases) as I am, Waterfox just MIGHT get a lot more popular. It would be interesting to know if their download count has suddenly skyrocketed. If you install Waterfox BEFORE updating to Firefox 57 and then have it copy all your settings from Firefox, it will look almost exactly like Firefox. Not all addon settings get copied, though (the addon itself gets copied, but not all the settings do for some addons), so you may have to change some of them by hand.
Wonderful post, but you forgot perhaps the best thing about BASIC - the commands were actually mnemonic. If you had a memory that was something akin to a sieve with a Teflon coating, you could still remember enough of the BASIC language to do something useful in it. I first learned BASIC using a friend's account on a DEC PDP-10 timeshare system (he kept insisting I should learn Fortran, because he said that would be the language of the future!), then on a TRS-80 Model 1, and then using QBASIC under MS-DOS. Now I have an OS X system but I still keep a copy of QBASIC tucked away, that I run under a MSDOS emulator on the rare occasion that I need to get something done quickly.
I've been told that everything you can do in BASIC you can do in Perl. But I have tried to learn Perl, and to me it seems incredibly difficult compared to BASIC. I've written a few short things in Perl, but every time I have I've had to go to some Perl resource and ask for help, because nothing is intuitive. And I always think about how easy it would be to write the same program in BASIC.
You can push the languages that "real programmers" use until you are blue in the face but they will never do what BASIC did, which was make it possible for everyone to be a programmer. Small business owners were writing code, or getting their 14 -year-old kids to write code, that would do simple things like print invoices. And the neat thing was that it would be written in a way that the business owner could understand how to use it. No thrusting off an expensive accounting package, where you had to take night classes to even know how to use the thing, and the program would not contain 1,000 features that would never be used. Instead the business owner got just what was needed to do the job, no more and no less, and if something changed they could fix the code themselves.
I think the real reason that there is so much hostility toward "beginner's" languages is that it comes from people who want programming to be obtuse. Just as auto mechanics love it when cars become so complex that "shadetree mechanics" can no longer work on them, "expert" (read: snooty) programmers that make a living writing code do not want people to have access to a language that's easy to remember, and easy to write code in. Now I understand that such languages have their limitations, and there are times when the use of a more advanced language is the only thing that will do. But for many simple tasks, particularly those involving the manipulation of data, BASIC will work just fine. It may not be the fastest language in the world, but if it's a choice between writing and debugging the code in a couple hours rather than a couple frustrating weeks, and being able to figure out the bugs myself rather than having to go on a forum and getting some obtuse piece of code I have no hope of deciphering (if I'm lucky and aren't ignored completely), I'd choose BASIC every time.
A couple of years ago I had to write a program to do some manipulation of TV schedule data for a PVR backend system, in order to get it into the XML format that the backend program understands. I tried Perl but was getting nowhere with it, then it occurred to me to see if there was any way I could use BASIC. I found FreeBASIC, installed it and wrote my program in BASIC, and in one evening I had it up and running, and I'm still using it two years later. I've need to make minor tweaks once or twice (due to changes in the source data) and in both cases I could do them; I didn't need to wait for someone else to fix the program for me. You have no idea how empowering that is.
The tl;dr version is that for many people, a "beginner's" language is all they will ever need to get their real-world tasks done, particularly if those tasks involve simple data manipulation, and BASIC had the added advantage of having easy-to-remember commands and statements. For those of you who have experience with PBX software, Asterisk's dialplan language is in many ways similar to BASIC, while FreeSWITCH's dial
I am one of those people who almost always gets my rebate, although I agree that the #1 thing you have to do is call about it when it is past the due date. And, you MUST make copies of EVERYTHING you send. Also, save a copy of the store ad showing the offer on the item, especially if you think there's any chance the store is promising more than what the rebate fulfillment center will deliver.
Now once in a blue moon, I've had a company try to deny a rebate for some reason. For example, once on a CD-R they tried to tell me I had not sent the UPC (I had a scanned copy of the UPC I had cut out of the box). This was on a name-brand CD-R from a large chain office supply store and I was talking to the chain's rebate center. I said, "I have a copy of everything I mailed in, including the UPC. I would be happy to send you a copy but you should realize that if I do, I'll also be sending a copy to my state's attorney general's office, naming the store in my complaint. (Please note they had already denied my rebate, I would not do that if they simply requested a copy of the submission, but at that point they were trying to stonewall me). So the person on the other end put me on hold for a moment, came back and said, "Mr. *****, we see by your records that you are a good customer of [the office supply chain] so we will go ahead and process your rebate."
If a rebate center denies the claim and can't be budged, I go back to the store with copies in hand and ask the manager to pay the rebate (usually they will if you either have a denial postcard, or it's been about six months and all you've gotten is the runaround - but there may been a reason for that which is peculiar to my state, which I will get to in a moment). Of course certain stores may not be willing to do this, but others are.
By the way, those online rebate forms that some companies are starting to use protect YOU against spelling errors in your name or address. I know it's easier to fill out the paper coupon, but when you do it online they have NO excuse for getting your name or address wrong.
One other thing to think about. If you are deaf, you may not have a voice telephone. If you live in a shared living situation, you may not have a phone of your own. In either case, you *usually* can note that on the form where they ask for a phone number. It is not a requirement to have a telephone in order to get a rebate, unless it says that it is on the form. If you leave the "Phone Number" line blank, that is an incomplete form and they may reject it for that reason. But if you are deaf and put "deaf - no voice telephone", or if you are living with someone else, have no phone of your own and simply put down "no phone", you have put something on that line and now your form is not incomplete. If you have doubts (and are in the latter situation), call the toll-free number on the form and ask what to put on the line if you have no phone - usually they will tell you that "no phone" is fine (of course you should do that BEFORE you cut out the UPC).
(Which reminds me, always make cutting out the UPC the LAST thing you do, that way if the rebate is screwed up in some way you will know while you can still return the item. I have returned items once or twice in the past simply because the rebate form was too ambiguous or complicated to complete).
Now, here is part of why I think I do so well. For one thing I have the persistence of a bulldog once the rebate is about a month overdue - I call back at least every 30 days and I don't take "no" for an answer (you tell me I won't get my rebate and both you and the store will be named in a complaint to my state attorney general).
The other thing is that I live in a state where the attorney general's office takes consumer protection seriously. They have an online complaint form which makes filing a complaint easy, and they do follow up on such complaints, and they do fine businesses that are repeat violators (and it isn't just a slap on the wrist, either). So any time I've
I remember the story, it was even fictionalized for one of the old sci-fi shows, maybe the original Outer Limits? But I had heard the story from my dad before that show ever aired. Basically, some guy walked into the U.S. patent office (back in the day when you could actually just show up with invention in hand) with an internal combustion engine (a minature automobile engine, or something similar) with an empty gas tank, and some pellets. When it was his turn to be seen, he showed that the tank was empty, put in a pellet, added plain water, and started the engine. The patent examiners told him to wait in an outside office for a few minutes while they discussed the matter among themselves. When they went back into the outer office to get the inventor, he had simply vanished, along with his engine and pellets. Vanished without a trace, it was as though he'd never existed at all.
I have no idea where my dad first heard the story be he told it to me when I was quite young - I think he may have read it in a magazine or something. I remember when they showed it on the original Outer Limits (on our old black and white TV), he couldn't believe they were showing the story on TV, but of course everyone took that to be pure fiction.
I'd be curious to know if there was any truth to the story - my dad seemed to believe it (I think he thought maybe one of the oil companies had something to do with the guy's disappearance) but for all I know it could have been WWII-era urban legend.