It's worse than that. Nowadays they correct the price on their website, ship the product out, and then they submit fraudulent charges using the credit card info they have on file in order to "make up the difference."
In the case you're citing, there was never an error with the prices listed on Amazon. They advertised a buy-one-get-one-free sale, but a glitch in the system caused the cheaper price to be deducted twice -- which meant that if someone bought two items of the same price, they were both free. The advertised price was right -- the price at checkout was wrong. The "fraudulent charges" weren't based on Amazon changing prices -- it was Amazon charging the price they had actually advertised.
Everyone in that thread knew they were taking advantage of a mistake. There's one guy in that thread who ordered every item in the sale -- over a thousand dollars worth of DVDs -- paired in such a way that it was all free. I don't think he even had to pay shipping. Yes, Amazon screwed up by not canceling the orders when they corrected the glitch, but apart from the first person to notice the problem, everyone on that thread knew they were taking advantage of a programming error. As such, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.
I really don't understand how these pricing mistakes continue to happen.
Here's one example I know of: Last year Sony released a boxset of Pedro Almodovar films. They originally announced it as a four disc set with an MSRP of $40, but then changed it to eight films and a bonus disc for $120 without changing the ISBN. But Sony screwed up in informing retailers about the change, and several etailers ended up listing it as a four disc set at the original MSRP. The people inputting the prices had no way of knowing that the set they were selling was different from the one on the website, so no one caught the mistake until well after the release date. I got my copy for about $32.
If the advertised price is clearly a typo or misprint or something along those lines, then the retailer is not required to honor the price.
Depends upon the state. In Virginia if Best Buy has a misprint in their circular saying a new DVD is $1.99, they have to place notices by the entrance and next to the item explaining that the advertisement is in error -- if you get in before they have a chance to place the notices, they have to honor the advertised price. Similarly, they have to honor marked prices unless it's obvious the tag's been tampered with or the item's been set in the wrong spot.
You can't tell merchant items from Amazon-only items.
In the immortal words of John McLaughlin -- WRONG!
In 90% of the cases you can only buy from a third-party by clicking the "Buy new or used" button, which takes you to a page that lists each merchant offering the item. In the other 10% of the cases, there's a clear notice on the page saying, "Sold by Bed Bath & Beyond" or whatever the real retailer is.
Several of the Doctor Who audio tapes are selling at over 300 dollars a throw. Given that they're just Crystal Clear audios the BBC dubbed over with commentary, someone is making a fortune if anyone is paying the full ammount.
Are these sold by Amazon, or through their third-party reseller service?
False advertising is false advertising and as such is fraudulent.
That greatly depends on the state. Some say a store must honor a price ticket (assuming a customer hasn't tampered with it) even if it's a mistake, but others allow stores to refuse sales in such cases. I don't know what the rules are in the states where Amazon operates from, but they do make their policy clear in their terms of service.
I wonder if Amazon had overpriced items would they voluntarily give the money back.
If they caught it before shipment, yes -- they guarantee that if the price drops between the time you order and shipment, they will give you the lower price. After shipment, it's up to you to call, but they will do it.
What exactly do you think throwing money at NASA will do? Last time that was tried, we sent some men to the moon to plant a flag and play golf. I'd rather see a policy that actually encourages space exploration, not one that encourages Boeing and Lockheed to create overpriced gizmos for PR stunts.
Well, i'd like to pretend like (at least) Paris (specifically) isnt as dumb as she appears, but given that she wasnt exactly "poor" to start with, I cant really find a reason for her not to be as stupid as she appears.
She may've started with a nice kaboodle, but she's increased it significantly on her own through fashion-lines, perfumes, TV shows, and getting paid to show up at bars and clubs.
The only evidence of her stupidity that I've seen has been what she's said on those TV shows, which I have no reason to believe are real, and rash public behavior that's pretty much identical to a college freshman.
-The whole point of that part of the article was that to most users, the fact that facebook.com's ipv6 record is broken is not meaningful. What's meaningful to them is that they had XP before and it worked, and now they have Vista and it doesn't. It's about user perception.
I haven't touched the IP configuration on my Vista machine and I haven't had any trouble with Facebook, so I'm thinking this is a problem with how the OEM configured.
Because you installed Google Desktop Search and it makes no sense to have two programs indexing everything? Personally, I think the Vista indexing works just as well as Google's, and wish I could figure out a way to move the search/command line from the Start menu to the task bar.
1. Beta tapes lasted 1 hour, instead of two. How many 1 hour movies did you watch back then? None? This made the tapes next to useless for movies. Back then, recording movies off of HBO and shit was the thing to do... can't do it with Betamax! Tapes are too short. Those VHS tapes, though, they are just long enough!
Wrong. The original L-500 at slow speed NTSC had a 60 minute length. The L-750 was 90 minutes at slow speed NTSC. At faster speeds, both could handle 2 hour movies. I should know, I owned all the Star Wars movies on Beta.
How many Beta tapes did you see for rent back then?
Tons. My family didn't switch to VHS until 1984, and never had a problem find material to watch.
Bruce Schneier wrote about the long password requirement and how it can backfire because users can't remember them. My dad keeps his passwords in a text file on his desktop because his job requires them to change it every month, have letters and number and be different from the last 6 passwords. While that's good in theory, it's counterproductive because he doesn't (and can't) keep the passwords safe.
Which is why Schneier wrote Password Safe, so people can create arbitrarily long passwords and store them in an encrypted database.
How could a fake banking site possibly get your openid password? You only give your openid password to one site, the openid provider.
Well banks aren't likely to use OpenID anyway. But the sort of person who falls for phishing sites is the type who uses the same password everywhere, so if the phisher gets the guys bank password, he could turn around and try it on OpenID.
How about silly things like real working public transportation?
Public transportation has been tried numerous times in the US, and the result is almost invariably that it's not cost-effective. The DC area has a fantastic metro system, but it ran a $116 million deficit in 2006. Americans don't like to rely upon mass transit, no matter how good it is.
I can never quite understand how people think that making a copy of themselves means they personally will live forever. The copy is a separate individual from you and when you die, you are dead.
People care whether their children live, and those are just watered down copies.
Besides, copying is only one possible method for digitizing the brain. Alternatively, we could use Intelligence Amplification techniques where over time the brain is augmented with electronics, and then the meatware removed as its functionality is duplicated with electronics. You'd have continuity of consciousness the whole way, and at the end you'd be in a format that could be seamlessly moved into a virtual world.
TSA shouldn't have to worry about fixed-route vehicles that can't be used as weapons of mass destruction. But the time savings of not having to go through security won't matter if the nearest maglev station is significantly farther than the nearest airport -- and for that to not be the case, you'd have to have not one LA-NY route, but lines going through ever major city in the country.
The real problem with maglev is that airplanes are already good enough. Why would you want to spend billions of dollars for new infrastructure that might be a little faster than airplanes when for the same price you could get even faster planes.
Wow, we could have seven coast-to-coast rail routes that are almost as fast as airplanes (if you live close enough to one of the routes, but require a huge investment in infrastructure.
That might be a better use of the federal budget than the Iraq occupation, but that doesn't make it a good use of our money. Remember what happened to North Haverbrook after they built a monorail.
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Everyone in that thread knew they were taking advantage of a mistake. There's one guy in that thread who ordered every item in the sale -- over a thousand dollars worth of DVDs -- paired in such a way that it was all free. I don't think he even had to pay shipping. Yes, Amazon screwed up by not canceling the orders when they corrected the glitch, but apart from the first person to notice the problem, everyone on that thread knew they were taking advantage of a programming error. As such, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.
If you want a browser that doesn't use Javascript, get Lynx.
What exactly do you think throwing money at NASA will do? Last time that was tried, we sent some men to the moon to plant a flag and play golf. I'd rather see a policy that actually encourages space exploration, not one that encourages Boeing and Lockheed to create overpriced gizmos for PR stunts.
The solution is obvious -- the company should have just one or two 80 gig hard drives that employees connect to via Unix terminals.
Authentication is a probelm, whether it's considered one or not.
The only evidence of her stupidity that I've seen has been what she's said on those TV shows, which I have no reason to believe are real, and rash public behavior that's pretty much identical to a college freshman.
Besides, copying is only one possible method for digitizing the brain. Alternatively, we could use Intelligence Amplification techniques where over time the brain is augmented with electronics, and then the meatware removed as its functionality is duplicated with electronics. You'd have continuity of consciousness the whole way, and at the end you'd be in a format that could be seamlessly moved into a virtual world.
TSA shouldn't have to worry about fixed-route vehicles that can't be used as weapons of mass destruction. But the time savings of not having to go through security won't matter if the nearest maglev station is significantly farther than the nearest airport -- and for that to not be the case, you'd have to have not one LA-NY route, but lines going through ever major city in the country. The real problem with maglev is that airplanes are already good enough. Why would you want to spend billions of dollars for new infrastructure that might be a little faster than airplanes when for the same price you could get even faster planes.
Wow, we could have seven coast-to-coast rail routes that are almost as fast as airplanes (if you live close enough to one of the routes, but require a huge investment in infrastructure.
That might be a better use of the federal budget than the Iraq occupation, but that doesn't make it a good use of our money. Remember what happened to North Haverbrook after they built a monorail.
The Bible says that a well 10 cubits across will have a circumference of 30 cubits. An error of almost one and a half cubits is not "close".