They do this by asking for the receipt. They then look for items listed on the receipt, and verify those items are in the shopping basket. After a couple of checks to make sure different items listed on the receipt are in your basket, they wish you a good day and wave you on.

They are not checking you, they are checking that the checkout staff are not in collusion with thieves.. I worked in a large DIY store once, and their stated theory was that 90% of the thieves were customers but that 90% of the value stolen was staff, as the staff had vastly more opportunity.. so to keep the shrinkage down, the security watched the staff.

(they are a convicted monopolist after all)

I'm not sure that being a monopolist is any kind of crime, so being convicted of such a thing does not seem possible? However, I have seen such language here before and I would like to emphasize that they were convicted of being monopoly abusers, as in.. they abused their fully legal monopoly position. I feel that there are different possible PR angles around these terms, and it is important that we do not encourage that.

convicted monopolist: the implication can be promoted that its not really their fault that they are so popular that everybody uses their products and the EU really is unfair to penalize them because of that.

convicted monopoly abuser: this is much more difficult to weasel out of, as it has the negative word abuser in the phrase.

Personally, I prefer the latter phrase as it is more descriptive and correct, and I feel it is important to label such a company as this correctly, so that other people who would otherwise not know the details, are not as able to be misled..

Consider Google Maps reviews on restaurants. As a consumer I have found them highly valuable in avoiding restaurants that are poorly run and provide substandard food.

If you avoid them, based on bad reviews you found on the internet.. how do you know if the review is correct?

40kts sounds like a lot until you compare it to the speed at which a storm can move.

ORLY? Storm systems don't generally move that fast. The wind speed during a hurricane vastly exceeds that (Sandy was only a cat 2, with max sustained wind speeds of 110mph according to wikipedia, less than that when it hit the USA) but the storm itself does not move very fast, it will often dawdle around and my recollection is that it would be a pretty fast system to be doing over 30kts.. Hence my assertion that a fast ship with no reason to be in the area can (and does) get the hell out of the projected track.

We're talking about oceangoing and you want to talk about people tooling around a bathtub.

No, we are talking about a fancy private yacht built for Steve Jobs. Sure, it can go into the ocean but I am arguing that you can't compare it to a commercial vessel as it never will need to be in the kind of heavy weather that Runaway1956 writes of because a) it will not go where heavy weather is (far North, or far South) or b) it is fast enough to avoid the, comparitively slow moving and localised, heavy weather that occurs in more moderate areas.

Yes, more or less my point exactly...

Bounty

what were they doing out there in the face of a storm? They thought the ship would be safer at sea but they sure as hell weren't capable of running away from the storm track at 40kts. Even at 25kts, they could have been in florida the day before, or they could have gone the other way and been halfway to europe.

Titanic

They were on a scheduled crossing with beancounters in control (not in command) and the captain was all 'full steam ahead' when icebergs had been reported.. and note that RADAR had not yet been invented nor did he have access to satellite imagery

Fitz

They were out on the job going somewhere because they had to get there, in the worst storm the captain had ever seen! leisure superyachts have a different lifestyle, they don't do that.

Only a fool would go to sea aboard a vessel that isn't seaworthy.

Except that in these modern times, there are plenty of leisure vessels that are seaworthy for the conditions they are used in but not capable of withstanding a hurricane. Is every person who rows across a calm bay on a summer day a fool, because they didn't have a survival suit and an EPIRB on board? Every sailing boat does not need to be equipped for Cape Horn, when they are only going to Catalina Island for the weekend..

A ship? Fek - unless they run the damned thing aground first, it WILL have to weather a storm someday.

You speak of storms, sir, yet you also speak of destroyers.. note that the military ships you speak of will be standing on station, or going places that are a bit out of the way for various reasons (training perhaps, to ensure that the crew can take the worst of the weather when they need to)

But perhaps you don't have a grasp of the leisure aspect especially of the superyacht set? Those boats, like warships, can also travel at 40kts and have access to satellite images, wave height data and very good weather forecasting. They don't need to be anywhere near bad weather and indeed they usually run away when a violent storm approaches. They don't need to demonstrate how tough they are, and the people who own them really just like to lounge around in calm conditions in the sun. They can cross oceans in the calmest conditions, dodging around the worst weather and they usually do. The focus of design of such a yacht is not to endure terrible weather while carrying goods halfway around the world, nor to blockade a port in all weathers. The focus is that the owner is noticed, and envied for their wealth. That this boat is ugly is neither here nor there, it was custom built for 137 MILLION dollars and everybody knows it. The point was that people would look and say Oooh, that belongs to Steve Jobs, I can only dream I could be rich like him.

..but ultimately, how well does this help to get the next invoice paid on time, do you have to do the same every time?

In the UK at least, there is an EU Directive "2000/35/EC late payment scheme" in force which sets out a standard for business/business transactions.. at least you can charge interest on the outstanding invoices, not sure if that helps (as IIRC it is bank base rate plus 8%, meaning you can charge 8.5% after 30 days)

As far as I can tell there are like 4 datapoints available atm. Whoopdiedoo.

I thought that too since there is nothing showing in my town, but the wikipedia page says the project was started in 2005 and there should be a lot more than that..

By early 2011 the Wikispeedia database contained 28 million speed limit entries

Perhaps their database is slashdotted, or the website is just broken? For some reason the map API is slightly different from the normal google-map one..

Doesn't the RM offer regionless PO Boxes? I'm pretty sure I've seen addresses published which are just "Company Name, PO BOX 123" without a town.

not as far as I know: you might be thinking of freepost, which can use "freepost name" as the entire address.

You can probably pay the Royal Mail to hold a PO Box for you, but a PO Box address is extremely obviously a PO Box rather than a real address.

Having used a Royal Mail PO box in the past, I can say that its not that easy to set up such a thing unless you tell lies. You do need to already have a valid postal address in the post town that the PO box will be (a pain for me.. living on a boat, I wanted a postal address in a town that I did not have a valid street address in). Also, you can have the street addressed mail automatically diverted to your PO box, so that it is not obviously a PO box, which is also useful since banks at least won't allow your registered address to be a PO box.

it seems to me (with no time at all spent thinking about it, and I am scarcely skilled in the art) that it is when a device is being alarming that a whack is most significant.. just like a naughty child who knows they are doing wrong, when the 'whack' is applied then they will shut up. If you 'whacked' a child who was just playing peacefully they would justifiably object.. and please, substitute your choice of censure, if 'whacking' a child is distasteful to you.

So, the whack detection becomes more accurate when the current state of the device is accounted for.

you have a chunk of metal (a porous copper plate, if I recall correctly, as it provides a pretty large surface area) on the outside of the hull, or get a metal boat.. seawater is an excellent conductor.

I've also seen a sheet of copper laid against the inside of the hull, relying on the capacitance effect with seawater.. but I don't know how well that works. On the other hand, a metal hull is generally isolated from the seawater with paint, so I guess that is relying on capacitance also.

Corporations are people: living, breathing people.

Then why are corporations allowed to be bought and sold?

In fact, related to that, I am not sure that it is a good idea that corporations are allowed to own other corporations.. I would like to see some restrictions on what can own a corporation; it should only be actual people that can incorporate, not other corporations. Then we could always see who is actually responsible for the corporate malfeasance that regularly occurs.

There are two tides each day, one when the moon is directly overhead, and one when the moon is directly underneath. Since the gravitational attraction of the moon causes tides, can you explain why there is a tide when the moon is directly underneath?

Except that your statement is not actually true.. some places only have one tide per day, and even when there are two it is not directly aligned to the moon as the tides are caused by the water slopping back and forth, rather than following the moon around the planet.

I don't know enough about fourier transforms to comment on your second example, and your third is very oriented towards the current economic management who would like you to think that what they do is correct, but you might like to note that those people are generally getting richer at our expense, so I'm taking whatever they say with a pinch of salt.