The whole premise of this article is essentially flawed...
The whole premise of the article is an amusing jab at creationists and should be taken as seriously as you would their creation science. Did we read the same article?
PayPal's only recourse in that situation is to take someone who does a chargeback to civil court. My credit card issuer isn't going to care that PayPal claims I've waived something if they see dozens of duplicate charges on my card. They're going to refund the charges and block PayPal from any further ones.
"This problem reinforces my aversion to automatic bill payment services that give companies the authority to draw money from my bank account at their discretion."
But you created such an account anyway.
I'm not sure why the parent was modded troll. I believe the point here is that the submitter claims that his credit card was charged, and also says that money was drawn from his bank account. There are credit cards which essentially work as debit cards, where every purchase you make is immediately deducted from your bank balance, and your balance is your limit.
This is a really stupid kind of credit card to get. With a regular credit card, any transactions made are done without touching your money. It's a virtual line item on a statement. Got a problem? Call your card issuer and dispute the charges. It's now Skype's problem to prove those charges were authorized and nothing touches your bank account. When your credit card is tied to your bank account, any problem charges are instant money out of your pocket. You're then fighting to get your money BACK. For those who don't have (much) savings that could mean you don't make the mortgage/rent payment, you can't buy food, and so on until it's resolved.
It also didn't explain what a Camera was, nor what Mathematica was. I've also seen stories on Slashdot about something called Google, but it didn't really explain what that did either. Christ on a stick, people! Explain every word for us!
Another analogy is that it's like buying a house at the address 1234 Main Street, Anywhere, USA knowing that other people would try to deliver packages to your address with a "Dear Occupant" label. It's not illegal to open those at all.
How does that work? Do you just watch his show to get annoyed? I could see how one could find a TV host offensive, dumb, sleazy (picturing Rush to come up with these), but to get consistently annoyed by someone who you'd only watch by your own free choice is rare.
What's even stranger is that to find something annoying, you seem to think that you have to repeatedly subject yourself to it. Here's a scenario: let's say you got stung by killer bees once. You're perfectly correct to say that you find killer bees annoying. Anyone who claims to be baffled by why you consistently get yourself stung by your own free choice would be an idiot.
Uh, I don't think you understood what you're replying to. Your analogy applies to pre-cap service, which no one was complaining about. To further your analogy, the addition of the caps is like having gone there for years and typically eaten 2-4 plates, then one day they take your plate away after you've finished your first helping, and tell you there's a one-plate limit. Suddenly, it doesn't seem like nearly as good a deal.
You're right -- I missed that part. When the service you buy has no caps advertised, and they later introduce a cap, then it will decrease the value of the service. Makes perfect sense.
The only exception I can think of is unless the cap is so ridiculously high that it doesn't matter to just about everyone, such as the restaurant imposing a caveat saying maximum 15 plates of food when most people can't eat more than 3. Maybe that'd reduce the value for a sumo wrestler, but most people would see no decrease in value from that cap.
Irrelevant! I am differentiating between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. You're a typical anti-corporate insect.
Wow, I can see the froth.
You object to applying the same argument against individuals. The principle is the same. How does the argument change if the Prius costs is less than the credit? Are the "previously bike-riding individuals" scumbags then?
Well, let's take this scenario you propose then. For sake of argument, let's just say the Prius cost is $30,000 to drive it new off the lot with all taxes and fees included. Using your argument that the cost is less than the credit, let's say I would get a $35,000 credit for buying a Prius. Now, let's say that I buy a Prius for $30,000 and get the $35,000 credit, and then have the Prius compacted into a cube and sent to the landfill for a few hundred bucks. I've just made almost $5,000 and have polluted the environment even more. Further, let's say I just keep on doing this. After buying ten Priuses and throwing them into the landfill, I'm almost $50,000 ahead. Hell, I'd buy as many Priuses as I could if I would have a $5,000 profit from each one. They couldn't make enough of them.
I would consider *myself* a scumbag if I did that.
So let's say you go to an all-you-can-eat restaurant. The restaurant advertises you can eat as much as you want for stays of up to 2 hours, as long as you don't waste food, and that they will clear used plates from you table within 2 minutes. The cost the restaurant charges for this is $19.95.
Assuming you can eat one plate of food in 5 minutes, and that it takes you 3 minutes to get a new plate of food, then you can consume one plate of food every 8 minutes. The 3 minute refill time is also enough for their 2 minute plate clearing to come into effect. Thus, over the course of 2 hours or 120 minutes, you could consume 15 plates of food.
For a $19.95 price, this works out to be $1.33 per plate. If you go into the restaurant and only consume 3 plates of food, do you expect your bill to decrease to $4.00?
On the almost-feature of floppy insertion detection in Windows 95
Gosh, that floppy insertion article generated a lot of comments.
First, to clarify the table: The table is trying to say that if you had a Style A floppy drive, then issuing the magic series of commands would return 1 if a floppy was present, or 0 if the floppy was not present. On the other hand, if you had a Style B floppy drive, then issuing the magic series of commands would return 0 if a floppy was present, or 1 if the floppy was not present. That's what I was trying to say in the table. The answer was consistent within a floppy style, but you first had to know what style you had.
The downside of waiting until the user uses a floppy for the first time is that you have the it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't problem. Dad buys a new computer and a copy of the Happy Fun Ball game for his son. Dad turns on the computer, and then follows the instructions that come with the Happy Fun Ball package: "Just insert the floppy and follow the instructions on the screen." Dad inserts the floppy and... nothing happens because this is the first time Dad used the floppy, and he was expecting autodetection to work.
Dad says, "Stupid program doesn't work."
Dad complains to his co-workers at work. "He loves this game Happy Fun Ball when he visits his cousin's house, so I bought a computer and a copy of Happy Fun Ball, and it doesn't work!"
Dad tries again that evening and this time it works, because in the meantime, he inserted a floppy to do something else (say, create an emergency boot disk). Bizarre. This just reinforces Dad's impression that computers are unpredictable and he will never understand how to use them.
One could say that a feature that mysteriously turns itself on and off is worse than a feature that simply doesn't work. At least when it doesn't work, it predictably doesn't work. Human beings value predictability.
You can't perform the test "the first time the drive is installed" because there is no way to tell that a drive has been installed. (Classic floppy drives are not Plug-and-Play.) Even worse, you can't tell that the user has replaced the Style A floppy drive with a Style B floppy drive. The user will see that floppy insertion detection stopped working and return the drive to the store. "This drive is broken. Floppy insertion detection doesn't work."
It is also not the case that the ambiguity in the specification indicated a flaw in the specification. The C++ language specification, for example, leaves a lot of behaviors at the discretion of the implementation. This allows implementations to choose a behavior that works best for them. The no-spin-up floppy presence detection algorithm relied on several behaviors which were covered by the specification, and one that was not. It was not part of the original charter for the floppy specification committee to support spinless presence detection; it's just something that my colleague discovered over a decade after the specification was written.
But the main reason for not bothering is that the benefit was minuscule compared to the cost. Nobody wants floppy drives to spin up as soon as a disk is inserted. That just makes them think they've been attacked by a computer virus. It'd all just be a lot of work for a feature nobody wants. And then you'd all be posting, "I can't believe Microsoft wasted all this effort on floppy insertion detection when they should have fixed insert favorite bug here."
Slashdot Mirror
The whole premise of this article is essentially flawed...
The whole premise of the article is an amusing jab at creationists and should be taken as seriously as you would their creation science. Did we read the same article?
Damn, that's about the most insightful thing I've seen on Slashdot in a while. Too bad you posted AC.
PayPal's only recourse in that situation is to take someone who does a chargeback to civil court. My credit card issuer isn't going to care that PayPal claims I've waived something if they see dozens of duplicate charges on my card. They're going to refund the charges and block PayPal from any further ones.
But you created such an account anyway.
I'm not sure why the parent was modded troll. I believe the point here is that the submitter claims that his credit card was charged, and also says that money was drawn from his bank account. There are credit cards which essentially work as debit cards, where every purchase you make is immediately deducted from your bank balance, and your balance is your limit.
This is a really stupid kind of credit card to get. With a regular credit card, any transactions made are done without touching your money. It's a virtual line item on a statement. Got a problem? Call your card issuer and dispute the charges. It's now Skype's problem to prove those charges were authorized and nothing touches your bank account. When your credit card is tied to your bank account, any problem charges are instant money out of your pocket. You're then fighting to get your money BACK. For those who don't have (much) savings that could mean you don't make the mortgage/rent payment, you can't buy food, and so on until it's resolved.
... since we are using spacious reasoning for now...
If you're going to misspell it, I think species reasoning would be more appropriate to the discussion.
For quintuple blind, everyone involved in the experiment must be 100% visually impaired.
Totally useless:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+average+wingspeed+of+an+unladen+swallow%3F
It also didn't explain what a Camera was, nor what Mathematica was. I've also seen stories on Slashdot about something called Google, but it didn't really explain what that did either. Christ on a stick, people! Explain every word for us!
Good enough for Amazon to use and sell: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/
So... open sorts wins?
Another analogy is that it's like buying a house at the address 1234 Main Street, Anywhere, USA knowing that other people would try to deliver packages to your address with a "Dear Occupant" label. It's not illegal to open those at all.
How does that work? Do you just watch his show to get annoyed? I could see how one could find a TV host offensive, dumb, sleazy (picturing Rush to come up with these), but to get consistently annoyed by someone who you'd only watch by your own free choice is rare.
What's even stranger is that to find something annoying, you seem to think that you have to repeatedly subject yourself to it. Here's a scenario: let's say you got stung by killer bees once. You're perfectly correct to say that you find killer bees annoying. Anyone who claims to be baffled by why you consistently get yourself stung by your own free choice would be an idiot.
+6, Funny
What I think you're looking for is "carp" and all flavors of bsd do it.
Here is the third sentence of the post you replied to:
"Currently, the setup has an automatic failover for the OpenBSD servers via CARP, which works great."
Given that, he's most likely talking about .NET Session state.
Uh, I don't think you understood what you're replying to. Your analogy applies to pre-cap service, which no one was complaining about. To further your analogy, the addition of the caps is like having gone there for years and typically eaten 2-4 plates, then one day they take your plate away after you've finished your first helping, and tell you there's a one-plate limit. Suddenly, it doesn't seem like nearly as good a deal.
You're right -- I missed that part. When the service you buy has no caps advertised, and they later introduce a cap, then it will decrease the value of the service. Makes perfect sense.
The only exception I can think of is unless the cap is so ridiculously high that it doesn't matter to just about everyone, such as the restaurant imposing a caveat saying maximum 15 plates of food when most people can't eat more than 3. Maybe that'd reduce the value for a sumo wrestler, but most people would see no decrease in value from that cap.
Irrelevant! I am differentiating between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. You're a typical anti-corporate insect.
Wow, I can see the froth.
You object to applying the same argument against individuals. The principle is the same. How does the argument change if the Prius costs is less than the credit? Are the "previously bike-riding individuals" scumbags then?
Well, let's take this scenario you propose then. For sake of argument, let's just say the Prius cost is $30,000 to drive it new off the lot with all taxes and fees included. Using your argument that the cost is less than the credit, let's say I would get a $35,000 credit for buying a Prius. Now, let's say that I buy a Prius for $30,000 and get the $35,000 credit, and then have the Prius compacted into a cube and sent to the landfill for a few hundred bucks. I've just made almost $5,000 and have polluted the environment even more. Further, let's say I just keep on doing this. After buying ten Priuses and throwing them into the landfill, I'm almost $50,000 ahead. Hell, I'd buy as many Priuses as I could if I would have a $5,000 profit from each one. They couldn't make enough of them.
I would consider *myself* a scumbag if I did that.
So let's say you go to an all-you-can-eat restaurant. The restaurant advertises you can eat as much as you want for stays of up to 2 hours, as long as you don't waste food, and that they will clear used plates from you table within 2 minutes. The cost the restaurant charges for this is $19.95.
Assuming you can eat one plate of food in 5 minutes, and that it takes you 3 minutes to get a new plate of food, then you can consume one plate of food every 8 minutes. The 3 minute refill time is also enough for their 2 minute plate clearing to come into effect. Thus, over the course of 2 hours or 120 minutes, you could consume 15 plates of food.
For a $19.95 price, this works out to be $1.33 per plate. If you go into the restaurant and only consume 3 plates of food, do you expect your bill to decrease to $4.00?
Thats a terrible analogy.
I think you meant to say that it was a bad analogy, considering the username you replied to.
Though I'm puzzled as to what effect testing a Canadian will achieve.
On the contrary... from the follow-up article:
On the almost-feature of floppy insertion detection in Windows 95
Gosh, that floppy insertion article generated a lot of comments.
First, to clarify the table: The table is trying to say that if you had a Style A floppy drive, then issuing the magic series of commands would return 1 if a floppy was present, or 0 if the floppy was not present. On the other hand, if you had a Style B floppy drive, then issuing the magic series of commands would return 0 if a floppy was present, or 1 if the floppy was not present. That's what I was trying to say in the table. The answer was consistent within a floppy style, but you first had to know what style you had.
The downside of waiting until the user uses a floppy for the first time is that you have the it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't problem. Dad buys a new computer and a copy of the Happy Fun Ball game for his son. Dad turns on the computer, and then follows the instructions that come with the Happy Fun Ball package: "Just insert the floppy and follow the instructions on the screen." Dad inserts the floppy and... nothing happens because this is the first time Dad used the floppy, and he was expecting autodetection to work.
Dad says, "Stupid program doesn't work."
Dad complains to his co-workers at work. "He loves this game Happy Fun Ball when he visits his cousin's house, so I bought a computer and a copy of Happy Fun Ball, and it doesn't work!"
Dad tries again that evening and this time it works, because in the meantime, he inserted a floppy to do something else (say, create an emergency boot disk). Bizarre. This just reinforces Dad's impression that computers are unpredictable and he will never understand how to use them.
One could say that a feature that mysteriously turns itself on and off is worse than a feature that simply doesn't work. At least when it doesn't work, it predictably doesn't work. Human beings value predictability.
You can't perform the test "the first time the drive is installed" because there is no way to tell that a drive has been installed. (Classic floppy drives are not Plug-and-Play.) Even worse, you can't tell that the user has replaced the Style A floppy drive with a Style B floppy drive. The user will see that floppy insertion detection stopped working and return the drive to the store. "This drive is broken. Floppy insertion detection doesn't work."
It is also not the case that the ambiguity in the specification indicated a flaw in the specification. The C++ language specification, for example, leaves a lot of behaviors at the discretion of the implementation. This allows implementations to choose a behavior that works best for them. The no-spin-up floppy presence detection algorithm relied on several behaviors which were covered by the specification, and one that was not. It was not part of the original charter for the floppy specification committee to support spinless presence detection; it's just something that my colleague discovered over a decade after the specification was written.
But the main reason for not bothering is that the benefit was minuscule compared to the cost. Nobody wants floppy drives to spin up as soon as a disk is inserted. That just makes them think they've been attacked by a computer virus. It'd all just be a lot of work for a feature nobody wants. And then you'd all be posting, "I can't believe Microsoft wasted all this effort on floppy insertion detection when they should have fixed insert favorite bug here."
I did say cuter. If you find a hottie reciting Rhabarberbarbara, please post!
WILL DO
Agreed!
Funny, that. Just yesterday you were claiming it's April 1st when it was really March 31st. Stop living in the future, man!
I don't know... Picard's brother seemed quite rude when he visited after his Borg assimilation incident. Though the wife was rather nice.