If you generate the form, you can include a key and keep track of when the key was generated. When the form data is submitted, check the key generation time stored on the server to see if it the elapsed time was too quick for a human response. I may do this on one of my forms.
In my experience, spambots ignore the result of their posts. so the user clicks "Submit", then is presented with a confirmation page generated by the script. After clicking "Submit" again, the form is processed. I've NEVER gotten a spambot message using this system.
Re:I can't let you get away with that!
on
Rumsfeld Stepping Down
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I remember a lot of arguments about why the US should or shouldn't invade Iraq. I don't recall a lot of people arguing that they didn't have WMD. There were arguments about whether an invasion was the "best" way to deal with the threat. There were arguments about the cost (blood, money, stability, prestige). There were arguments about just how much threat Iraqi WMDs actually posed to the US. But the idea that there weren't any WMDs was nowhere near the top of the list of arguments.
UN inspectors left Iraq just before Clinont had the place bombed in 1998. He did that because Saddam wasn't letting the inspectors do their work. Saddam didn't let those inspectors back in unti Bush threatened to invade the place and actually started building up forces in Kuwait. Even then, there were still indications that Saddam was playing shell games. He'd been uncooperative with the UN inspectors for years. In South Africa, when they chose to give up nuclear ambitions, the UN inspectors had no problems verifying that they'd done so. That's because South Africa was not trying to maintain a nuke program and wanted everyone to know that. Iraq under Saddam was a completely different story. He resisted the inspections the whole time. Unlike South Africa, there was no evidence that Saddam had made a good faith effort to get rid of his nuke program. Basically, even though the inspectors could not prove it, it looked like he was lying.
Even so, there were still good arguments against invading. I made some of them myself in arguing with friends at the time. But the assertion that the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs just isn't supported by the available evidence.
People who are angry at how this has turned out have lots of good arguments to choose from. The "WMD was a lie" argument just ain't one of those.
If there are lines at the cashier lines, an available self-checkout, and I have only a few simple items, I'm going with the self-checkout. I count those 5-10 minutes (and the associated aggravation) as part of the price I pay to get things from that store. Okay, so I'm impatient. I don't lash out, I mind my own business, and I make choices about where & when I shop with both my impatience and finances in mind. There have been plenty of times when I spent a little more for convience.
One thing I'm definitely not going to do is stand in a long line in order to "force" the store into giving discounts for self-checkout. My time is more valuable to me than that.
That's largely not the case. With credit cards in the USA, for instance: "By law, once you report the loss or theft, you have no further responsibility for unauthorized charges. In any event, your maximum liability under federal law is $50 per card."
But that does not limit your liability in cases of identity theft. The thief could get all kinds of credit in your name without your knowledge, just by knowing your name and SSN. You could end up liable for everything they do. That liability needs to be transfered to the parties who granted credit without sufficiently validating the identity of the applicant. When that happens, this situation will be fixed so fast it will make your head spin.
There are biological reasons to support traditional marriage that are simply undeniable. That's why proponents of gay marriage try to make it a rights issue.
It's not just about rights.
Many people in exit polls supported some level of legal protection for gay couples, but "marriage" just isn't the word to describe what they're doing.
Do they have their tickets yet? If I could be sure they would leave and stay gone, I'd contribute to their air fare.
These people need to get out of the echo chamber. There are a lot of Americans who think differently from them and have good reason to do so.
Life in non-urban America is so different from the big city that it's hard to understand without living it for a while. I grew up in big city suburbs and then spent some years living in less dense places. I'd pick the latter over the former in a hot second. I have friends who like living in/near the city, and I understand them, but I just don't see things the way they do.
Your cant't-live-here-anymore friends can't need to figure out how to get rid of their blind spot about the values of Red State folks.
I see the folks who only wanted to get rid of Bush as short-sighted and borderline irresponsible. when they got finished pounding on Bush, someone still needed to run the country, and Kerry just ain't the guy.
If I had to answer the abstract question "Do you think Bush should be re-elected?" I'd answer no. But that's not really the question. The real question is who can best take us from where we are to where we need to go.
Kerry has never run anything other than his mouth and political campaigns. For whatever faults Bush has, he can lead and it's easy to know where he stands.
The reason why he got re-elected is because the Democrats nominated a sorry replacement. They disdain people who don't think the same way they do, especially people whose faith looms large in their daily lives.
If Gore hadn't been so closely associated with Clinton, he would have won. If Kerry hadn't had such a sorry record in the Senate and hadn't been such a flip-flopping, rudderless, pandering candidate, he may have won.
A presidential election is not some kind of academic exercise. The winner has to actually understand and lead ordinary people. It's not enough to have a plan and a position paper. Kerry just did not strike a chord with most voters, and those who think they know where he stands didn't agree with his positions on things that are important to them. That's why he lost.
Keep in mind that we already have an extremely powerful arm of the government that represents states rather than people; the senate.
That used to be true when the states directly selected senators. Since they are now voted in by popular vote, keeping the job means satisfying voters, not the state govt.
But what tangible affect on the day-today lives of those Christians do those issues really have? None. None at all. They're not gonna get an abortion, nor will they marry a same-sex partner.
Pure short-sightedness.
These things are part of the definition of what kind of society we live in. Once you get above subsistence level living, non-tangibles matter.
Standards exist to verify receipt of messages and are implemented in most popular mail clients. If users choose not to use those features, they have only themselves to blame. The students should have requested read-receipts and the professor should have sent those receipts.
Tell it to the sailors of the USS Cole, who, after being bombed by terrorists, had Al Gore's people trying to have their absentee ballots thrown out because the military postal system is not required to use postmarks.
Florida had problems with 16,000 ballots in 1996 in the same counties that had problems with 24,000 ballots in 2000. What do you think the Democrat-controlled election boards of those troubled counties did to fix the problem in the four years between 1996 and 2000? (answer: Nothing). They knew they had significant problems counting ballots and chose to ignore those problems for years, until forced to face the issue by a contentious election and national attention being focused on their negligence.
On top of that, the recounts being requested by the Gore campaign were against the law. The recounts that were specified by Florida law had already been conducted within the time allocated by the law. Gore's lawsuit basically attempted to ignore the written election law because he did not like the results of the counts and recounts that were conducted according to the law. Attempting to ignore election law would be a pretty good definition of "subverting democracy" to any reasonable person.
It turned out that people are simply too lazy to bother with switching channels or skipping ads on tape. They will also be too lazy to use TiVo.
You do not understand the ease of skipping commercials on Tivo.
In the first place, Tivo is always recording. When you're watching "live" TV, what you're actually seeing on the screen is a 2-3 second delayed playback of a 30min Tivo recording. There is no explicit action needed to record a broadcast -- the recording process for "live" TV is automatic. In fact, you can't turn it off even if you wanted to. Everything is recorded as you watch.
That reduces skipping commercials to hitting a single button labeled [>>] 1-3 times (depending on how fast you want to go), then pressing a button labeled [>] to resume normal playback.
To skip commercials using a VCR, you have to make a decision to record a program, confirm the time/channel, then go through the labor-intensive (compared to Tivo) process of programming the VCR, then make sure you have a tape inserted that has enough space. After waiting for the entire program to record, you have to rewind the tape to the beginning of the program and start the playback. Just to skip commercials. No wonder it didn't catch on.
Given the large number of people who own a VCR, and aren't actually able to program it to prerecord a show (don't have statistic), can't we expect lots of people not being able to do this with their TiVO (or related technology)?
No. Using a Tivo is so much easier than using a VCR that the number of people who can't do it is going to be small. It's like the difference in effort between setting up an operating system yourself and calling a guru to setup an operating system for you. Mostly geeks can do the former while almost anyone can do the latter.
The biggest hurdle with Tivo is conceptual; you basically have to use it to understand what it can do for you and how much having one changes your TV habits. Once you understand what the thing can do for you, using it is too easy. Not everyone will use all the features, but skipping commercials only involves the [||] and [>>] buttons.
Tivo is a computer with a smart interface that's almost as simple as an ATM. There won't be any "flashing 12:00" problems.
There's a Washington Post report on the final results, but I can't find a complete text. I have been able to find that a complete recount would have given the state (and therefore the election) to Bush. People need to face these facts and stop carping about a "stolen" election.
No Bills (A paper trail doesn't vanish - online bills can)
Just take a screeenshot and save it. I always do this for payment confirmation pages. Linux users can also print to file. The resulting PostScript file can be printed, gzipped, or converted to PDF for Winusers. Windows users can install a color Postscript printer driver (HP Color LaserJet works fine), set it for Print-to-File and create PostScript files which can be viewed/printed using the no-cost Win32 version of GhostView.
If I get a confirmation email message, I save that too.
Any of these files can be burned to CD for archiving. Support for PostScript, PDF, JPEG, and PNG should be around for as long as you'll need to look at these payment records.
I'd like it better if the vendor's system generated a digitally signed email message, but I save what they send anyway.
This is an even better example of why Star Office and OpenOffice.org will overtake MS Office, as Sun only now bundles a cripple-ware database app, and OpenOffice has none at all.
OpenOffice can create and use DBF files natively, but this functionality is not obvious. You have to create an empty directory to hold the DBF files (the database) then setup that directory as a data source. You can then right-click on "Tables" in the data source navigator and select "New Table Design". It will allow you to design the DBF using an interface similar to MS Access.
Besides, most desktop "databases" are actually spreadsheets. Most users don't know enough about databases to be able to take advantage of them, even if they had enough data to make it worthwhile to learn.
Well, I'm taking a break right now from generating new Excel graphs by copying old ones and changing the source data, which isn't so bad, and those fucking error bars, which is. Oh, and the scatter plot points are superimposed so you can't click on the back ones.
So if I could do a find&replace on a flat file, I'd have been done an hour ago.
Gnumeric uses an XML format. Maybe you could open a copy of the XLS in Gnumeric, then save in Gnumeric native format (XML) and run your search/replace on that. Then open and save back to XLS and see how it looks.
Read the U.S. Constitution. The Electoral College elects the president. The state legislatures are responsible for selecting their representatives to the Electoral College. Nowhere does it say that the president is elected by popular vote.
The state legislatures have mostly decided that they will select Electoral College representatives (Electors) based on the results of a popular vote within their state. If the popular vote fails for whatever reason, it is still the constitutional responsibility of the state legislatures to select Electors.
The popular vote is not the key to the presidential election. That misconception has been deliberately promulgated by the Democrats. The Electoral College system will not be changed in the foreseeable future and the Democrats have not helped their constituents by encouraging them to misunderstand the process.
My resume is only posted as HTML. The included email link specifies a Subject that my filters look for. That's good enough for people contacting me via my on-line resume. When I'm actually in the job market, I have a filter that allows subject lines related to jobs. That allows in people who have my email address in a database, or who copy/paste it into a message instead of using the link.
It is unlikely that a spammer will generate a valid sender. Hoping to generate a valid fake address to deceive my challenge system is too much time/effort for most spammers. In the first place, they would have to include contact info in the Subject of the message. Not likely.
There is a way to fix this, and it's not complicated, but it will require agreement among mail client developers.
Sender sends message. Sender's mail system records Message-ID of outgoing message in a temporary whitelist.
Recipient's antispam system receives message and issues challenge, including original Message-ID in the In-Reply-To header of the challenge message.
Sender's antispam system receives challenge and notes that it is a reply to one of its owner's messages. The challenge is let through.
Sender responds to the challenge and original message is delivered.
I recently purchased a Toshiba notebook. It was sealed in cellophane, with a label that declared that the complete system is a bundle and that Toshiba would not honor requests for partial refunds of the system price for components that were not used/desired. The customer was directed to return the system to the place of purchase for a comnplete refund, if desired. It was my thought that this policy was directly implemented in respone to customers that might wish a refund of the cost of Windows.
It was implemented specifically for that purpose. Until that kind of shrinkwrap license was included, the Windows EULA should have been honored. The OEMs knew that if anyone had chosen to go to court, this was basically an open and shut case. They had no way to wiggle out of the responsibility for a refund. The only reason they hadn't done the shrinkwrap thing before is because no one had ever called them on it.
Consumers have every right to expect that vendors will abide by the terms of their own contracts/agreements/licenses. Anyone who has one of the pre-shrinkwrap EULAs should be able to get a refund if they abide by the terms of the EULA. The shrinkwrap folks have fewer choices. As you say, they should probably buy from someone else. they should also tell a manager at the company that they would have bought from, that they didn't because they did not want to pay for a Windows license.
I bought my VW Golf two years ago, and i'm very pleased with it, except for that crappy in-dash radio they MADE me buy. I could not buy the vehicle without buying the radio. Maybe we can organize a Factory Radio Refund Day?
What if the car came with a document that purports to be a binding contract that says that if you don't want the radio you can return it for a refund? Then when you return the radio, the company refuses to honor the terms of the contract that they themselves wrote. They will not refund your money even though their own contract says they will.
Windows comes with a EULA that says you can get a refund. Microsoft and the OEMs have repeatedly and consistently refused to abide by their obligations according to the EULA. This is the EULA that Microsoft wrote and that the OEMs all understand and agree to as part of their distribution contracts.
If users violate the EULA, MS may sic the BSA on them. But MS is supposed to be able to routinely violate their own EULA? I don't think so.
They don't have any excuse. They just need to abide by the terms of their EULA.
Slashdot Mirror
If you generate the form, you can include a key and keep track of when the key was generated. When the form data is submitted, check the key generation time stored on the server to see if it the elapsed time was too quick for a human response. I may do this on one of my forms.
In my experience, spambots ignore the result of their posts. so the user clicks "Submit", then is presented with a confirmation page generated by the script. After clicking "Submit" again, the form is processed. I've NEVER gotten a spambot message using this system.
I remember a lot of arguments about why the US should or shouldn't invade Iraq. I don't recall a lot of people arguing that they didn't have WMD. There were arguments about whether an invasion was the "best" way to deal with the threat. There were arguments about the cost (blood, money, stability, prestige). There were arguments about just how much threat Iraqi WMDs actually posed to the US. But the idea that there weren't any WMDs was nowhere near the top of the list of arguments.
UN inspectors left Iraq just before Clinont had the place bombed in 1998. He did that because Saddam wasn't letting the inspectors do their work. Saddam didn't let those inspectors back in unti Bush threatened to invade the place and actually started building up forces in Kuwait. Even then, there were still indications that Saddam was playing shell games. He'd been uncooperative with the UN inspectors for years. In South Africa, when they chose to give up nuclear ambitions, the UN inspectors had no problems verifying that they'd done so. That's because South Africa was not trying to maintain a nuke program and wanted everyone to know that. Iraq under Saddam was a completely different story. He resisted the inspections the whole time. Unlike South Africa, there was no evidence that Saddam had made a good faith effort to get rid of his nuke program. Basically, even though the inspectors could not prove it, it looked like he was lying.
Even so, there were still good arguments against invading. I made some of them myself in arguing with friends at the time. But the assertion that the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs just isn't supported by the available evidence.
People who are angry at how this has turned out have lots of good arguments to choose from. The "WMD was a lie" argument just ain't one of those.
If there are lines at the cashier lines, an available self-checkout, and I have only a few simple items, I'm going with the self-checkout. I count those 5-10 minutes (and the associated aggravation) as part of the price I pay to get things from that store. Okay, so I'm impatient. I don't lash out, I mind my own business, and I make choices about where & when I shop with both my impatience and finances in mind. There have been plenty of times when I spent a little more for convience.
One thing I'm definitely not going to do is stand in a long line in order to "force" the store into giving discounts for self-checkout. My time is more valuable to me than that.
--Tony
That's largely not the case. With credit cards in the USA, for instance: "By law, once you report the loss or theft, you have no further responsibility for unauthorized charges. In any event, your maximum liability under federal law is $50 per card."
But that does not limit your liability in cases of identity theft. The thief could get all kinds of credit in your name without your knowledge, just by knowing your name and SSN. You could end up liable for everything they do. That liability needs to be transfered to the parties who granted credit without sufficiently validating the identity of the applicant. When that happens, this situation will be fixed so fast it will make your head spin.
--Tony
There are biological reasons to support traditional marriage that are simply undeniable. That's why proponents of gay marriage try to make it a rights issue.
It's not just about rights.
Many people in exit polls supported some level of legal protection for gay couples, but "marriage" just isn't the word to describe what they're doing.
--Tony
Having one of the dumbest men to ever lead a country be _re-elected_ should scare the rest of the world. Sleep tight, don't let the WMD bite!
Are you aware that Bush had a higher [grade point average | SAT score] than Kerry?
--Tony
Do they have their tickets yet? If I could be sure they would leave and stay gone, I'd contribute to their air fare.
These people need to get out of the echo chamber. There are a lot of Americans who think differently from them and have good reason to do so.
Life in non-urban America is so different from the big city that it's hard to understand without living it for a while. I grew up in big city suburbs and then spent some years living in less dense places. I'd pick the latter over the former in a hot second. I have friends who like living in/near the city, and I understand them, but I just don't see things the way they do.
Your cant't-live-here-anymore friends can't need to figure out how to get rid of their blind spot about the values of Red State folks.
--Tony
Kerry didn't know what 51% of the country was thinking either. That's why he lost.
That would seem to be a valid outcome.
--Tony
John Kerry was a sorry candidate. Period.
I see the folks who only wanted to get rid of Bush as short-sighted and borderline irresponsible. when they got finished pounding on Bush, someone still needed to run the country, and Kerry just ain't the guy.
If I had to answer the abstract question "Do you think Bush should be re-elected?" I'd answer no. But that's not really the question. The real question is who can best take us from where we are to where we need to go.
Kerry has never run anything other than his mouth and political campaigns. For whatever faults Bush has, he can lead and it's easy to know where he stands.
The reason why he got re-elected is because the Democrats nominated a sorry replacement. They disdain people who don't think the same way they do, especially people whose faith looms large in their daily lives.
If Gore hadn't been so closely associated with Clinton, he would have won. If Kerry hadn't had such a sorry record in the Senate and hadn't been such a flip-flopping, rudderless, pandering candidate, he may have won.
A presidential election is not some kind of academic exercise. The winner has to actually understand and lead ordinary people. It's not enough to have a plan and a position paper. Kerry just did not strike a chord with most voters, and those who think they know where he stands didn't agree with his positions on things that are important to them. That's why he lost.
--Tony
Keep in mind that we already have an extremely powerful arm of the government that represents states rather than people; the senate.
That used to be true when the states directly selected senators. Since they are now voted in by popular vote, keeping the job means satisfying voters, not the state govt.
--Tony
But what tangible affect on the day-today lives of those Christians do those issues really have? None. None at all. They're not gonna get an abortion, nor will they marry a same-sex partner.
Pure short-sightedness.
These things are part of the definition of what kind of society we live in. Once you get above subsistence level living, non-tangibles matter.
--Tony
Standards exist to verify receipt of messages and are implemented in most popular mail clients. If users choose not to use those features, they have only themselves to blame. The students should have requested read-receipts and the professor should have sent those receipts.
Tell it to the sailors of the USS Cole, who, after being bombed by terrorists, had Al Gore's people trying to have their absentee ballots thrown out because the military postal system is not required to use postmarks.
Florida had problems with 16,000 ballots in 1996 in the same counties that had problems with 24,000 ballots in 2000. What do you think the Democrat-controlled election boards of those troubled counties did to fix the problem in the four years between 1996 and 2000? (answer: Nothing). They knew they had significant problems counting ballots and chose to ignore those problems for years, until forced to face the issue by a contentious election and national attention being focused on their negligence.
On top of that, the recounts being requested by the Gore campaign were against the law. The recounts that were specified by Florida law had already been conducted within the time allocated by the law. Gore's lawsuit basically attempted to ignore the written election law because he did not like the results of the counts and recounts that were conducted according to the law. Attempting to ignore election law would be a pretty good definition of "subverting democracy" to any reasonable person.
It turned out that people are simply too lazy to bother with switching channels or skipping ads on tape. They will also be too lazy to use TiVo.
You do not understand the ease of skipping commercials on Tivo.
In the first place, Tivo is always recording. When you're watching "live" TV, what you're actually seeing on the screen is a 2-3 second delayed playback of a 30min Tivo recording. There is no explicit action needed to record a broadcast -- the recording process for "live" TV is automatic. In fact, you can't turn it off even if you wanted to. Everything is recorded as you watch.
That reduces skipping commercials to hitting a single button labeled [>>] 1-3 times (depending on how fast you want to go), then pressing a button labeled [>] to resume normal playback.
To skip commercials using a VCR, you have to make a decision to record a program, confirm the time/channel, then go through the labor-intensive (compared to Tivo) process of programming the VCR, then make sure you have a tape inserted that has enough space. After waiting for the entire program to record, you have to rewind the tape to the beginning of the program and start the playback. Just to skip commercials. No wonder it didn't catch on.
Given the large number of people who own a VCR, and aren't actually able to program it to prerecord a show (don't have statistic), can't we expect lots of people not being able to do this with their TiVO (or related technology)?
No. Using a Tivo is so much easier than using a VCR that the number of people who can't do it is going to be small. It's like the difference in effort between setting up an operating system yourself and calling a guru to setup an operating system for you. Mostly geeks can do the former while almost anyone can do the latter.
The biggest hurdle with Tivo is conceptual; you basically have to use it to understand what it can do for you and how much having one changes your TV habits. Once you understand what the thing can do for you, using it is too easy. Not everyone will use all the features, but skipping commercials only involves the [||] and [>>] buttons.
Tivo is a computer with a smart interface that's almost as simple as an ATM. There won't be any "flashing 12:00" problems.
Initial report by Miami Hearald
e rald.recount/
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/02/26/miami.h
There's a Washington Post report on the final results, but I can't find a complete text. I have been able to find that a complete recount would have given the state (and therefore the election) to Bush. People need to face these facts and stop carping about a "stolen" election.
No Bills (A paper trail doesn't vanish - online bills can)
Just take a screeenshot and save it. I always do this for payment confirmation pages. Linux users can also print to file. The resulting PostScript file can be printed, gzipped, or converted to PDF for Winusers. Windows users can install a color Postscript printer driver (HP Color LaserJet works fine), set it for Print-to-File and create PostScript files which can be viewed/printed using the no-cost Win32 version of GhostView.
If I get a confirmation email message, I save that too.
Any of these files can be burned to CD for archiving. Support for PostScript, PDF, JPEG, and PNG should be around for as long as you'll need to look at these payment records.
I'd like it better if the vendor's system generated a digitally signed email message, but I save what they send anyway.
This is an even better example of why Star Office and OpenOffice.org will overtake MS Office, as Sun only now bundles a cripple-ware database app, and OpenOffice has none at all.
OpenOffice can create and use DBF files natively, but this functionality is not obvious. You have to create an empty directory to hold the DBF files (the database) then setup that directory as a data source. You can then right-click on "Tables" in the data source navigator and select "New Table Design". It will allow you to design the DBF using an interface similar to MS Access.
Besides, most desktop "databases" are actually spreadsheets. Most users don't know enough about databases to be able to take advantage of them, even if they had enough data to make it worthwhile to learn.
Well, I'm taking a break right now from generating new Excel graphs by copying old ones and changing the source data, which isn't so bad, and those fucking error bars, which is. Oh, and the scatter plot points are superimposed so you can't click on the back ones.
So if I could do a find&replace on a flat file, I'd have been done an hour ago.
Gnumeric uses an XML format. Maybe you could open a copy of the XLS in Gnumeric, then save in Gnumeric native format (XML) and run your search/replace on that. Then open and save back to XLS and see how it looks.
Read the U.S. Constitution. The Electoral College elects the president. The state legislatures are responsible for selecting their representatives to the Electoral College. Nowhere does it say that the president is elected by popular vote.
The state legislatures have mostly decided that they will select Electoral College representatives (Electors) based on the results of a popular vote within their state. If the popular vote fails for whatever reason, it is still the constitutional responsibility of the state legislatures to select Electors.
The popular vote is not the key to the presidential election. That misconception has been deliberately promulgated by the Democrats. The Electoral College system will not be changed in the foreseeable future and the Democrats have not helped their constituents by encouraging them to misunderstand the process.
My resume is only posted as HTML. The included email link specifies a Subject that my filters look for. That's good enough for people contacting me via my on-line resume. When I'm actually in the job market, I have a filter that allows subject lines related to jobs. That allows in people who have my email address in a database, or who copy/paste it into a message instead of using the link.
It is unlikely that a spammer will generate a valid sender. Hoping to generate a valid fake address to deceive my challenge system is too much time/effort for most spammers. In the first place, they would have to include contact info in the Subject of the message. Not likely.
There is a way to fix this, and it's not complicated, but it will require agreement among mail client developers.
I recently purchased a Toshiba notebook. It was sealed in cellophane, with a label that declared that the complete system is a bundle and that Toshiba would not honor requests for partial refunds of the system price for components that were not used/desired. The customer was directed to return the system to the place of purchase for a comnplete refund, if desired. It was my thought that this policy was directly implemented in respone to customers that might wish a refund of the cost of Windows.
It was implemented specifically for that purpose. Until that kind of shrinkwrap license was included, the Windows EULA should have been honored. The OEMs knew that if anyone had chosen to go to court, this was basically an open and shut case. They had no way to wiggle out of the responsibility for a refund. The only reason they hadn't done the shrinkwrap thing before is because no one had ever called them on it.
Consumers have every right to expect that vendors will abide by the terms of their own contracts/agreements/licenses. Anyone who has one of the pre-shrinkwrap EULAs should be able to get a refund if they abide by the terms of the EULA. The shrinkwrap folks have fewer choices. As you say, they should probably buy from someone else. they should also tell a manager at the company that they would have bought from, that they didn't because they did not want to pay for a Windows license.
I bought my VW Golf two years ago, and i'm very pleased with it, except for that crappy in-dash radio they MADE me buy. I could not buy the vehicle without buying the radio. Maybe we can organize a Factory Radio Refund Day?
What if the car came with a document that purports to be a binding contract that says that if you don't want the radio you can return it for a refund? Then when you return the radio, the company refuses to honor the terms of the contract that they themselves wrote. They will not refund your money even though their own contract says they will.
Windows comes with a EULA that says you can get a refund. Microsoft and the OEMs have repeatedly and consistently refused to abide by their obligations according to the EULA. This is the EULA that Microsoft wrote and that the OEMs all understand and agree to as part of their distribution contracts.
If users violate the EULA, MS may sic the BSA on them. But MS is supposed to be able to routinely violate their own EULA? I don't think so.
They don't have any excuse. They just need to abide by the terms of their EULA.