Or how little English the customer speaks, which is often related to how annoyed the service rep becomes. Or how xenophobic the service rep is. Or whether the service rep is currently having a bad day. Or any other of 3,723 possible factors.

I don't see, in any linked article (or the summary), any suggestion that Li understood the manager's English at all. The article says that she was earlier told that two was the limit, which is something that *can* be conveyed with body language in the case of a language barrier. Nowhere does any article suggest that she understood that she was not to come back. I fail to understand how you can infer that she spoke English from this.

The officers, on the other hand, had every reason to believe that she understood them, because when she acted ignorant initially, they yelled more loudly. I'm sure that cleared things up.

The summary doesn't say it (and the linked article doesn't expound), but according to http://www.dwicourts.org/drugged_driving this "night" of which they speak is a weekend night. So, Friday or Saturday. Living in NYC and riding a motorcycle (which I refuse to do nowadays on Friday and Saturday nights), I'd expect that number to be much higher, but perhaps the rest of the nation averages it out. Or perhaps many people who plan to drive with a BAC over 0.08 know where these checkpoints may lie. I did, and actively avoided them due to traffic concerns, when I did ride (sober) on those nights.

Why is everyone bashing HP and Meg Whitman for this? The purchase happened pre-Meg, and this write-off is a great decision on HP's part. There's a fair chance that the purchase decision wasn't even as poor as HP's making it out to be, and this write-off is just being maximized for tax purposes.

Hate HP for making us individual taxpayers pick up the slack, but don't hate them for being stupid (in this case).

I wonder how many people who posted comments here, thinking that streaming music analytics is a good idea, would also enable the do-not-track flag in their browsers and opt out of Google's targeted ads.

Right. And, according to TFA, none of their supplies ever went out. I live in NYC. A lot of the city lost power, sure. The transit system was knocked out, sure. There was a lot of flooding in fringe areas, where most data centers weren't. This guy is talking about NYC like it got demolished by the storm. Slashdot already did a piece on how a NYC data center mitigated power loss; reading TFS, I was hoping for a point of view from a more heavily battered standpoint. Instead, I got, "We had back-ups, and we think they work because we test them regularly, but we didn't actually have to do anything."

"We didn't do anything special; our power never went out."

This is perhaps the worst recommendation here.

In theory, it works. In practice, it's a terrible idea, unless your aim is to walk out with a Mac.

I'm going to examine Best Buy, but the strategy is typical, and other large retailers, such as J&R and B&H, operate similarly.

1. If Best Buy hasn't sold its old stock yet, they put it out on the floor. If you want newer stock that _isn't_ on the floor, you have to ask for it -- but it's packed up, and you don't get to play with it.

2. Cheap laptops sell well. So Best Buy management says, "Let's put out more cheap laptops!" Then there isn't enough room for high-end laptops on the floor. That's okay, because high-end laptops don't sell well. Soon, high-end laptop sales drop even more, and management thinks that has something to do with demand.

3. Higher-end laptops that are on the floor are built with poor specs, and they're from low-class brands. Again, i imagine that this is to keep the price down.

Scenario: Bob walks into a Best Buy to look at their highest-end Windows-based laptops. They're lousy. They're made by Sony or Toshiba, and they're falling apart on the shelf. But he sees low-end Lenovos with the cheapest, lousiest screen options next to them. He looks up the model and sees that many of them are from last year. Then he looks at their Mac selection. It's current (because Apple requires it), and the screens are decent. The hardware isn't rock-bottom. He walks out of Best Buy thinking that if he wants a computer that doesn't suck, he has to get a Mac.

In reference to another reply:
You want to know who's killing Best Buy? Best Buy is.

This is, in fact, how one-time passwords work. Once upon a time, RSA strengthened the security of their tokens through algorithm obscurity. The only news is that the algorithm cannot be considered obscure any longer. And this news is old. The fact that some random "researcher" learned enough of a programming language to create a program that takes a number and uses it as a random seed is not something that anyone (aside from said "researcher", and probably his proud parents) should care about.

Unfortunately, dump requires a supported filesystem. But most people forget about the incremental backup features of regular old tar(1).

The only one who wins here is the ad affiliate.

Yeah. It would have been clever for Facebook, had they planned it, but for Google, it would have been known as "learning from history". But Google saw the successful recipe, and they didn't learn from it. I learned from it. I shouted, "You're doing it wrong!" at the first invite I received. And perhaps worse than that, they ignored the cardinal rule of introducing a new service: Don't piss off your users before they're even your users.

Encryption has a major flaw:
http://xkcd.com/538/

If it's obvious that the drive is toast, then it's the torture that becomes pointless.

They had a decent enough buzz. They had a decent enough product. They utterly failed on the delivery.

Let's look at how Facebook (inadvertently!) succeeded with its introduction:
- release the product to a small number of people who all know each other and feel exclusive
- release the product to another small number of people who all know each other and feel exclusive
- release the product to still more people who all know each other and feel exclusive
- open it up to the world and let it grow organically

Now, here's what Google did:
- generate a lot of buzz about a promising new product
- allow a limited number of invites, but allow anyone to be invited, so new people who join know only the person who invited them, and can't even invite new people yet. But they do feel exclusive, and can't wait until they know someone.
- feed the anticipation of all the people who are clamoring to get an account
- open up invitations to anyone
- reject new sign-ups from people who were invited once they hit an unspecified threshold, so that only a small number of new people actually signed up, and the only person each knows is the one who invited him
- open up invitations to anyone
- reject new sign-ups from people who were invited once they hit an unspecified threshold, so that only a small number of new people actually signed up, and the only person each knows is the one who invited him
- open up invitations to anyone
- reject new sign-ups from people who were invited once they hit an unspecified threshold, so that only a small number of new people actually signed up, and the only person each knows is the one who invited him
- eventually, people got tired of being rejected and didn't sign up, or left because they didn't know many people when they first joined.
- open it up to the world.

Did Google really expect people to just "try again later" after receiving an invitation and being rejected? Twice? Three times?

Major introduction fail.

Right, because all they did, AFAIK, is spoof caller-ID information to gain access to the voicemail without a password, and IT WAS NOT ILLEGAL at the time. So the police are charging whomever they can with whatever they can to make the public happy.

All Murdoch had to do was say, "Yeah, we did what we could, within the confines of the law, to get the story," and the whole thing would have blown over in a couple of days. Instead, companies crumble and lives are ruined for something that was in poor taste, but was, largely, a big misconception.