You can replace anything with anything, I can pull down a power station and build a hotel, or a hospital on the site if I want. There is no law saying a replacement building must have the same function as the old one.

The problem with these initiatives are they try to change everything all at once.

A far better strategy is to adopt a gradual migration to open solutions. This is much easier to achieve on background systems, train your IT staff or hire new ones with Linux and other open source software experience and set out to replace things like Windows servers, Microsoft and Oracle databases etc with Linux and PostgreSQL. Users rarely interact with these systems directly, they are managed by IT staff.

On the user facing systems, keep the Windows or macOS environment they are used to, but replace some of the key tools they use over time. Again, don’t necessarily change everyone at once, and not necessarily start with the office suite that everybody uses. Perhaps start by installing Both MS and LibreOffice for users, start encouraging people to use LibreOffice for writing documents so they can get used to it for such simple tasks, wile still having Excel and PowerPoint available to work with. Over time with encouragement and given the time to familiarise themselves with the different interfaces, there will be less push back. Tell them they must use a particular tool and they will simply get frustrated, that they can’t do something and start demanding to use the commercial software again. There needs to be a properly managed transition period that focuses on everybody learning to try new things until they are confident enough to let go of the tools they used to use.

This occurs for two reasons

1. Amazon places returned items back into fulfilled by Amazon stock without proper checking.

2. Co-mingled stock results in the same item from multiple sellers being put into the same stock, so you are not necessarily getting a product supplied by the seller, but the first one to hand from the stock. Stock is not properly checked, so one bad seller can send in fake items to FBA.

^This, Amazon is a terrible company, it is crammed full of awful quality products that are promoted above the decent stuff. People have just got into the habit of buying from Amazon without looking elsewhere. The prices are often better elsewhere but because people have prime, they feel compelled to use it. The only winner is Amazon, both sellers and buyers lose out in the end.

Of course there are plenty of fraudulent sellers, but Amazon’s response is to give a refund regardless. There is a whole industry grown up around exploiting this known loophole. Customers can literally make hundreds of claims against sellers in a month a wi every case. There are no safeguards in place to protect established sellers from fake accounts registering and placing 100 orders in a day and then filing claims for all of them.

There needs to be a proper evaluation of probability where a customer that has a good buying history is given the benefit of the doubt in a dispute, but a customer with many disputed purchases favours the seller in good standing.

It would be simple for Amazon to be able to allow sellers to block purchases from certain buyers like eBay does, but because that would make a bod buying experience for a small number of genuine buyers they won’t do it.

Amazon don’t care about giving refunds, they still get their commission for the sale, even when refunded and it isn’t their money but the sellers’ that they are issuing refunds with, so it is free promotion for them, offering free products to fake buyers. You’ll find that if the item is sold by Amazon they are far more rigorous in investigating claims and denying them than they are for marketplace purchases.

Yes there are problems with fraud for all online retailers, however the problem is orders of magnitude bigger on Amazon. The situation is that Amazon automatically refund ‘buyers’ in almost every case. The sellers have no real way to defend against this, not even barring buyer accounts that have previously defrauded the seller. In our experience over a 1 year period.

Direct sales from our website, 1.8% successful fraudulent transactions.
EBay sales, 3.1%
Amazon Marketplace 11%

At least with eBay you can block repeat offenders from buying from you and your own online store you have complete control over who you sell to or who you issue a refund to, we spot the majority of potential fraudulent activity by odd things in the order, like mismatched payment address or unusual quantities or combinations of items.

Amazon marketplace is a scammers paradise. I have an existing established online retail business, we tried Amazon and the level of fraud was shocking. Amazon does nothing to try and address the problem, they lose nothing when a ‘buyer’ defrauds a seller so they have no incentive to do anything about it. Sellers are not even allowed to cancel orders fro accounts that have previously defrauded them.

After about a year of crazy losses on Amazon we gave up. Amazon don’t care that we left, they have an endless supply of gullible new sellers to take our place.

Hopefully canonical will get fed up with playing cat and mouse withe the scammers and finally give up on the stupid snaps!

I would have expected the basis of any extradition from a country without capital punishment would only ever agree to extradite to a country with capital punishment on the basis that the capital punishment option was ruled out. Countries like the UK that are morally opposed to capital punishment cannot possibly hand someone over with a chance of the death penalty being imposed would give implied support for capital punishment.

Seems like they generative AI isn’t quite there, the doctor will have to wait for regenerative AI :)

The only insurance I have is car insurance due to it being a legal requirement to drive. When I took out a mortgage the lender required life insurance and buildings insurance, as soon as the mortgage was repaid both of those insurance arrangements were tossed in the trash where they belong.

All insurance is a con, you pay upfront and get nothing in return, if you do make a claim you are effectively given a loan that they will have you repay through higher premiums after a claim.

Your vehicle is only licensed to carry 5 people, so you will be limited to carrying 4 embryos at any one time.

What about Softbank’s daughter, what is she building :)

As this creates a loophole that essentially exempts EU vehicles from fines, if the EU refuses to allow access to the information then EU vehicles should not be allowed on UK roads.

I was with you until you said Snaps! Snaps are utter trash and the very reason we have moved from Ubuntu to Debian.