A few years back, my great uncle died. His name was on the Comcast cable bill, and my grandmother, his sister, didn't bother to change the name on the bill. She just kept paying the bill to continue the service.

Then she started getting notices of non-payment and service termination even though my aunt had paid the last few bills in person in cash. (Thankfully, she kept the receipts.) The service, however, was not actually terminated as they had stated. They were on the phone and at the local office many times trying to figure it out. On the phone they stated the service was disconnected, and my grandmother and aunt stated they had the television on right then and it was obviously not disconnected. Comcast said they were wrong despite the television being on in the background.

As it turns out, there was an unrelated man, living in the same town, with the same name as my great uncle, who stopped paying his bill. His middle initial differed and the difference between the two account numbers was the last two digits were the reverse of each other.

Apparently, when various Comcast service representatives would look at either account, they would randomly assume the information shown to them on their computers was wrong and think it was the other account. This lead to them pulling up incorrect accounts when doing customer service, applying payments to the wrong accounts, incorrect late fees, terminating the wrong accounts, and insisting the my grandmother and aunt were wrong about the particulars when talking to them.

Finally, my aunt asked to change the name on the account. Prove the account holder is dead, they said. Totally understandable, but still frustrating after months of bad customer service. Once the death certificate was provide, Comcast had the nerve to charge a rather large installation fee to "connect up the service" that was, of course, never disconnected in the first place-- it was just a name change on the billing statement.

They refused to pay the installation fee, returned the equipment, and switched to Direct TV.

<rant>Confused identities are a pain-in-the-butt! I've been confused for my dad on my own credit report due to Chase assuming, same names, same addresses, same person! The error was they did not have my dad's birth date or soc.sec. number on file, so they matched his name to my name as I also had a card with them at the same address. As it was my mom's credit card on my credit report, Chase said it was up to _my_mom_ to remove _my_name_ from _my_credit_report_. I find it strange that I wasn't allowed to fix my credit report that they had erroneously altered. Thankfully, my family is very close, and my mom did fix the problem as Chase instructed. Image the nightmare if it had been a stranger's line of credit there, though. *sigh*</rant>

My two cents.
--Dave Romig, Jr.

It's sad to say, but my family's orchard is in the process of shutting down. Our orchard loses money almost every year it operates and it has for two decades at least (maybe slightly longer). It has a profit maybe once every 6 or so years. It didn't used to be this way. My grandmother has run the place for maybe 50 or 60 years when she acquired it from her father-in-law who ran it before then.

We are located in the U.S., in southeastern Pennsylvania (not far from Philadelphia). As far as I can tell, in our country, in our state, it does not pay to grow food-- at least not in the traditional sense (as food suppliers to food manufacturers seem to get by). I am not involved in the running or operating of the business, so these are just my observations. It costs so much to grow our crops. We can only sell to stores at set prices. The only prices we have control over are the ones at our local stand, which much be reasonable if we wish to sell. Weather affects the crops and we have no control over bad weather years. The workers are paid very minimally (and are all family for that reason-- but there is little want, so it works out). Last year's losses were through the roof. And, no one wants to take the business over. My grandmother is old and my dad and uncles are entering retirement ages.

I am sad. My family's orchard will probably such down next year. My grandmother declared there is no longer a possibility of a profit, so there's no reason to try continuing.

If anything, governments should be encouraging farming and the growing of food. I don't know if there's already programs out there for farmers-- I assume that there MUST be somewhere-- but I don't see them for the average farmer.

My two cents.
--Dave Romig, Jr.

I watched some youtube videos of Watson in practice matches in front of a packed audience a day or two ago.

I must say it was quite fascinating to watch. The sheer level of the technologies involved is just amazing, not to mention the complexities that link them together. I didn't realize some of them had advanced this far.

I hope this will at least improve automated customer services lines. I dealt with one in the last year that kept asking me to speak allowed my ID but kept recognizing "H" as "8" no matter how clearly I spoke. Others ask me to speak my request, but, because I usually only call customer service when a non-standard problem occurs, the systems generally will not recognize what I'm asking and keep repeating themselves, and, if I ask for a live customer service representative, it will keep doing its darndest to keep me in the automated system. The need for live reps hasn't been replaced yet.

My two cents.
--Dave Romig, Jr.

Agreed. I think that's what they were trying to do, but it failed. Another poster reminded me of a particular way PERL Regular Expressions can fail in PHP that would an escaping half-processed in this manner.

You have to wonder, though, most languages designed for web pages already have an optimized function for this type of escaping. Why not use it? Either they are trying to be clever or they reinvented the function in an incomplete way.

Maybe if the paranoia level it low, they'll announce what it was when its fixed.
--Dave Romig, Jr.

Sadly, something like that-- using the wrong regular expression-- would be the simple example at most places I've worked. I've often found the cause of some bugs to convoluted to the point of being baffling. I've seen a commercial PHP script that used an if-then statement with dozens of branches that each did nothing more that included a single file, nested, and then did it again. The final include files were almost identical except the name of the product to be displayed and its description. I was to add a product to that mess. I was mystified as to how someone thought _that_ was a good idea. Well, I got permission and rewrote it into a database lookup in maybe 15 minutes. Adding new products afterwards was certainly easier.

Interesting thought about the missing global flag, though. Considering it appeared to replace all occurrences except in that one case, I'm leaning away from that. I guess there could have been multiple expressions in play where one was missing a flag, but I cannot think of a reason off hand why someone would want to do that.

You did get me thinking though-- as I once wrote a parser in PHP using PERL Regular Expressions just for kicks-- how easy it is to blow the backtrack limit or the recursion limit when using recursion to properly handle more than one state. Once only subpatterns (either via adding + after + or . or via (?>) ) ultimately kept things under control (and was good for speed too), but I did not add them until my expression was confirmed working properly. During my first test run to verify the expression, I blew the backtrack limit which caused the expressions to silently stop replacing the string and return the rest of it unchanged. A separate call (which wasn't added to the final version) is required to detect the error although it quickly became obvious what had happened. The error patterns are similar. However, a complex pattern would be required to cause it. Again that could be caused by the wrong pattern, a programmer's test pattern instead of the one intended for the user.

Obviously I don't know the answer any more than anyone else does (save those at Google/youTube). I speculate for fun because its interesting and it keeps me thinking-- which always comes in handy at debug time.

Thanks for the alternate viewpoint.
--Dave Romig, Jr.

I find it interesting pondering the how and why these things fail-- the insight into how the code must have been put together to fail on a particular input.

My initial guess for this one would be that they escape html and scripts separately-- scripts do not need greater than, less than, and ampersand escaped-- and that detecting the keyword 'script' switched modes from html to script. The fact that the first script tag is properly html-escaped suggests that while it was properly detected, the code to switch between html and script modes did not take this detection into account and switched anyway. I'm going to further guess that this do to some support code meant for the programmers' side inadvertently managed to cross over into user land.

My two cents.
--Dave Romig, Jr.

Sometimes I think groups such as ASCAP forget that copyright is about letting people copy things and defining how and when it should be done. It's goal is to encourage copying and development as a way of progressing science and art. The restrictions on copying is about convincing authors via the lure of money to develop something further.

But the restriction gets tighter and tighter... how is life-of-the-author plus 75 years (the term for individuals i.e. non-corporate authors) supposed to encourage an author to develop the something they created further? I'm pretty sure they can't create new material after they've died. Plus, progress often comes from combining other people's stuff together in new and novel ways, which copyright, an idea to promote progress, often blocks in its current form. Long ago copying was hard and temporarily limiting was no big deal to the public; today in the digital age, copying is so easy that it can happen by accident while sorting one's computer files.

Creative commons is about striking a balance between copyright and public domain-- to come to a place closer to what copyright originally was. ASCAP would now have me believe that an independent artist, who is not affiliated with them, choosing to utilize creative commons will somehow bankrupt them (or something similarly awful) and that this would... what? destroy culture? stop development? I don't know as they don't really explain why its bad-- just a vague 'trust us, it's bad for authors' answer. If they are really worried about their business, they need to evolve with the times or simply go under just like all other companies. They are no more special then any other company, nor should they be.

ASCAP say that the opposite side wants people to believe that music is free, and that they do not want to pay for it. First off, music is already free. The purpose of copyright is to barter away a tiny bit of its freedom for money to motivate creators to create. Second, I don't hear anyone saying that don't want to pay for music. I either hear people expressing they want a simple and affordable way to pay, or people expressing dismay over paying for the same thing the umpteenth time. Groups such as ASCAP are often against a simple affordable way of excepting people's money. It competes with their old dying way of doing business. Again, evolve or go under. They go and ask the government for help. The people are giving us less money, please force them to pay again. (Well, it's never gotten THAT simple.) When their market changes, they simply should not be going to the government and asking them to force the market to do something. It doesn't work. It never has... and it has the side-effect of creating headaches for everyone along the way.

*Sigh* My two cents,
David Romig, Jr.