Oh, nevermind. Another post here says that someone put this guy's shipping label over the original one on the package which had it destined for a gun shop, so the problem occurred after it left the merchant's hands.

http://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3037651&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=40932463

I think it's more likely that the Assault Rifle was mis-matched to the TV, either via a similar but mistyped product identifier causing Amazon to think they're the same (not likely, they have other measures in place to stop this), or due to the merchant making a mistake and saying "Yep, this product looks right" to get it live without doublechecking things.

The rifle's description on Amazon would then be set to the TV's even though the products are completely different -- the merchant's description and pictures are ignored because they aren't the main seller of the product. A customer makes a purchase, the merchant sees the order and doesn't notice it's for a TV because they're rushing to ship all their orders (or maybe it doesn't even say on their end, but that seems unlikely), and the assault rifle goes out.

Complete mismatches like that don't happen too often, percentage-wise, but with a combination of the right/wrong factors, human error comes into play and they can slip by.

If they don't fulfill orders they get bad ratings. I think they're actually recorded with the reason being unfulfilled orders. Too many bad ratings and Amazon shuts down their account.

Exactly, a floor price is used to prevent this sort of crash from happening. I'd imagine there could be some sellers on there that haven't set up their floors properly and they could lose money on a few products, but the entire site won't implode from this.

If those sellers don't honor the prices, they'll get bad user ratings and lose some future sales over it.

No, no, I'm sorry I was being unclear. This is just my guess. Why else would throttled Torrent traffic impact gameplay?

That's what I meant. If you use bittorrent, you get throttled. You only notice it if you play WoW, so their solution is to tell people not to play WoW (or any game) so they won't notice. It's not a solution at all, they're just telling their customers to cover their eyes so they won't see the problem.

If people run torrents (the WoW updater) their connection is throttled. If they run WoW with a throttled connection, there is a problem. If they don't run WoW with a throttled connection, there is no problem.

Either way, the connection is throttled. It's just that if you don't play WoW during it you're less likely to notice.

Keep an eye out for free to play games. These two are probably a different genre than you want, but League of Legends has a "first win" bonus, such that with 1-2 hours of play you'll have collected a big bonus and can't collect it again for another day. Bloodline Champions has a bonus pool that triples your earnings until you exhaust it, and that resets daily. It takes about an hour to work through that. You can still play the game afterwards for rewards and fun play, but exhausting that bonus makes for a nice stopping point.

I'd imagine some free to play MMO will pop up sooner or later that'll have a longer to achieve daily bonus (as MMOs tend to be slower paced than the above action games).

Interesting read, thanks for the link.

I didn't watch it all, but the thing I noticed was that, when Watson thought it had an answer, most of the time it'd click in first. The other contestants didn't have a chance to attempt to answer.

So Watson wins on reaction time, which isn't a surprise for a computer that knows exactly when it can first ring in. How would it have done with a human's reaction time on clicking, just answering on questions alone?

Maybe your frames are different, maybe you have a big nose, maybe your theater uses differently sized 3D glasses, who knows!

Come to think of it, if you use big framed glasses do they have a separate nosepiece? Mine are small, thin glasses, but the nosepiece adds extra space to them. It's not the glasses pressing into my face, it's the nosepiece on my nose.

If I ever go to another 3D showing, I'm tempted to take the lenses from the 3D glasses and attempt to make them into a clip-on. That'd solve the annoyance of the big frames and mean I only have to wear one pair of glasses!

This sounds like a nice feature. My flash and other processes don't crash on me often, but when they do they can be frustrating. There was one thing that kept me on firefox 3.5 rather than 3.6, though.

It's really silly, but.. when I use the autoscroll (middle click) and am slowly scrolling down through a page, I like to use the mousewheel to scroll faster occasionally, or back up a little bit, while the scroll is still moving. In 3.6 I found that moving the mousewheel canceled the autoscroll. This is also a problem because my mousewheel's a bit sensitive, so sometimes just brushing it would cancel autoscroll.

Anybody know if there's a way to change that behavior so mousewheel doesn't cancel autoscroll, or if it's been reverted in a later 3.6 release?

I've had the same experience. The only people I used to talk to on it have moved to other IM services, and now it's just the occasional spammer. I don't really know why I keep it logged in.

My account's a 7-digit UIN starting with 9, haha. I must've had this account for around 10 years.

Back in my day, we played D&D and Magic and didn't care about getting a badge for it!

Sounds fun, though. I hope it'll include some game design requirements, to get the scouts thinking a little more about how their games are put together.

Why is it that liberal's answer to every problem is to throw more money at it? Certainly if we cut all other spending to the bone we could fund individual tutors for every student, free laptops, massages, anything. The question is this: who's responsibility is it to ensure students work hard and strive to achieve excellence? THE PARENTS. Not the government. End of story.

No amount of government spending can make up for bad parenting. Entitlement spending is a deep, dark, bottomless hole.

Not only that, but forcing another year of high school on smart students seems like punishment. I'm sure most of us can recall horror stories of our own public education (if we're from the US and went to public school) and, at the time, wanted nothing more than to get the hell outta dodge. After all, if the public education system has failed, why force another year of it onto the students to "train" them? That sounds to me to seem more like the real problem in our society: Punish those who succeed.

If nothing else, he should be advocating less time in high school. Place them in accelerated programs and graduate them early, give them scholarships to university--anything--but get them out of the public education system as quickly as possible. After all, if the students are "brainy," chances are they're more well motivated and organized than their peers and need to be challenge. Only university can provide them with the challenge they need.

You're right, though. It does smack of the entitlement mindset. I think it's really rather disgusting, because the system is so broken and rewards mediocrity so much more that forcing extra time for "more training" isn't going to accomplish anything. I really don't think that the solution to a broken system is to say "Hey, we know it's not working, but just give us another year of your lives and we'll promise to make it better."

Yeah, that's really going to work.