My daughter convinced me to take her to Kohl's for some basic shopping. I checked in on 4square and was surprised to find that it got me a discount. Then at the register, when they rang me up, it was less than expected even with the discount. I was happily surprised to discover after paying, that the receipt showed another discount which I commented on to the cashier. I was happy to hear that they often give those kinds of discounts.

The point is that when you get extra discounts, you don't assume they're made in error, you assume that you are being given a treat, probably something they are advertising and you just didn't see, by the seller.

See the 6 different instances of "slow down" explaining when they stop speeding at F1 races on wikipedia.

There are rules for a reason in racing and in hacking competitions. There are no rules if you do it outside a group event, and as a result the risks are significantly higher.

From TFA:

They see the DVD mailing as competing with the internet option, therefore giving them cause to support DVD mailing by discounting the price.

I'll tell you the truth and its up to you to live with it.

Oh cool! I known that shutdown -r -t 600 works on Windows when I expect it to finish installing an update and I'm ready to go for a coffee, but I never remember what it is in Linux. Thanks to your tip, I now know I can use shutdown -h but I know the Linux guy had to put a number, so let me try shutdown -h 0 and see what it tells me about how

I'm surprised to see this comment rated so highly.

If you are paying $15 a cup for coffee then presumably you have super awesome taste buds. So why do you need chemically analyse your coffee to tell if it's the real deal? You're coffee is either worth $15 or it isn't based on what it tastes like.

Taste is a very variable thing. If you're trying to train yourself to distinguish different tastes, then you need to try different things to learn what tastes you are capable of recognizing. If you're basing your experience on faulty information, then you're being cheated of your option to learn something. If you are going to try to learn the difference in sushi or wines and you are trying to learn the differences in tastes of different options, being lied to about what you're tasting means you won't be able to tell the difference between different grades of tuna, or different types of dry red wines. As a result, you're robbed of your ability to learn what brings you pleasure and what is worth spending the extra money on.

What a pointless bit of research. Have we now solved so many of the world's important problems that the top of the list is now "make sure hipsters are drinking genuine cat's bum coffee."

If you know absolutely everything that is important to know then you're a terrible person for not sharing your insight into how to solve every world problem. For everyone else, doing research that you are able to do that adds to the sum of human knowledge is valuable. Just because you don't know how to cure cancer yet doesn't mean you shouldn't put effort into finding a malaria cure. Curing world hunger is something we'd all like to know how to do, but if you don't know how to do that, it doesn't mean that there is no value in studying computer science. The best thing to spend money learning about is something where you can hope to find some success in learning something useful. Building a machine that can detect organic compounds may sound useless to you because you don't care about coffee, but good research results may mean that same technology can be applied to better bomb detection or allow computers to do what animals already do and actually detect cancer better. Saying the research shouldn't have money spent on something you don't care about is saying that people shouldn't do what good they're able to actually able to do.

If everybody had the mentality that nothing should be done if it wasn't working toward the big problems, we'd loose all the little great things that contribute to a better world.

So we know that the NSA lied to Congress and about half of the representatives want to stop the spying that Snowden told us about. That would seem to make the implication that Congress has realized that the few people who actually seem to care are in the majority against it. So Snowden shouldn't be that big a fish. We have federal laws against illegal immigration but the feds have decided not to put any effort into enforcement since it isn't popular. We have federal laws against marajuana, but with states making it legal, the feds have decided not to put any effort into enforcement. Now we have one guy and enforcement isn't popular, but yet they're making a big deal of enforcement?

On the one hand, I kinda get it, you have to enforce the laws to keep your secrets safe. On the other hand they're doing that already and have made it impossible for Snowden to return to the US without likely imprisonment. Isn't that more than enough? I'm surprised they'd do something to harm international relations over it.

Is it possible that Snowden has more information they're afraid that he'll turn over to another government? If he does, what could it be to be worth this witchhunt? It reminds me of Assuange which became a much bigger witchhunt than it seemed to warrant. I'm beginning to think that there must be some really ugly skeletons in the closet if Congress is this worried about people spilling secrets.

I'm with you in spirit but stuck in a situation where our single most important software vendor has incorporated interactive forms using Adobe PDF reader. Replacing it is so far beyond our budget that just discussing what it would take turns the discussion into a five year plan.

Doing our own software to replace it is even worse in terms of budgeting. If you'd like to make yourself a couple million dollars and a career for the next twenty years, you can go for it, but the initial investment requirements are going to be in the same range and it'll probably take a minimum of five years for you to get a new system past all the regulatory hurdles and any adoption.

If you do all that, drop me a line. We'll be looking for somebody new about that time.

For people stuck in reality: Our solution is to try to be very suspicious of PDFs that come into the system, but trust the ones already in there. It's not a great situation to be in but I hope this forum will give me some ideas on how we can better protect ourselves from the potential dangerous PDFs coming in.

Good points. I rather like the idea of something that removes every PDF from the incoming email but sends a follow up message "Your recent email with the subject line 'blah blah blah' sent at 'sentdate' had an unsafe type of attachment. You can download a safe version with 'this link' or you can contact the administrator if you require the unsafe version."

I wonder if procmail could do that for you?

Really? Personal Computer means Windows only in the heads of Microsoft marketing drones. It wasn't that long ago that PC was synonymous with Home Computer which certainly would have included Apple computers.

I was thinking pretty much the same thing. The right approach for this is to figure out how to answer these questions:

• Who gets paid?
• When?
• For what?
• How should they be paid? (not how they are paid)
• How do you maintain it?

The questions are simple. The process of answering them is hard. Building the software to handle the result is moderately complex but not nearly as hard as getting the answers.

The question of "how did the old software do it" should be irrevelant and it shouldn't matter that it was written in COBOL or how it worked. Fixing the software is the wrong approach and I suspect a doomed attempt from the beginning. They should have been working on how to build the right system instead.

Give me a billion dollars.

What, you want more? If you give me a billion dollars I will take it and make a very convinicing show of working hard to deliver whatever you want while I build up my "disappear and retire accounts" with only a small percentage of the money.

Of all the comments and passion I've seen on this story, this is the first time something got to me and made me actually sad.

Ow. You make me feel dense.

"By denying someone the right to a federally approved marriage of their preference, you're treating them as less than human." I've seen variations this argument repeatedly and that weakness never occurred to me. Whether you agree or disagree, I think you should consider the legitimacy of any argument worth discussing... and I totally missed that insight.

Stigma? My first thought was "I better tag my house" because even though I don't actually have a gun, I would like any potential thieves to think I do. Plus, where I come from (yes, Texas) gun ownership is seen as a good thing. People use their concealed carry permits as their preferred bragging type of state issued ID around here.

When you buy a computer you own it and should be able to do anything with it because you paid for it. In reality, you pretty much could but if you do some things, you're breaking various laws. The same is true for a DVD of course, you can copy it and sell the copies or stream them online but that's not legal either.

So long as you do what you want with your computer without interacting with other people, nobody cares. You can download youtube videos, copy DVDs, build your own versions of movies with your voiceovers in it or whatever you like because nobody cares (even if it isn't legal.) But as soon as you sell something or even give something away that breaks those laws, you get in a heap of trouble.

If I wrote the same app that MS did for my own phone and put it on my phone and computer and tablet, Google wouldn't notice me. I can make copies of videos and pass them around all my devices and Google still wouldn't notice me or care. But if I was Microsoft and did that for my customers... yeah, they notice and care.

Now is it ethical? You skip commercials and block ads, but regardless of what people want you to do, it is your computer/dvd player/iphone and you can do what you like. If you choose to view ads, support sponsors etc, that's being a good member of the community, and kudos for it. However, if you don't, so long as you aren't affecting other people, I wouldn't say it was unethical.

A long time ago, I had a friend whose father was one of the most honest and respectable people I knew. I found out that he was descrambling satellite TV and it surprised me. I asked my friend about it and he explained his father said something like "If they put it in my yard without asking me, I feel free to do with it as I like without asking them." I still think about that today when I'm questioning the difference between what is legal and what is ethical.