I'm going with what I consider to be a more likely situation where some asshole simply tossed together a script to increment the serial # by 1 digit each iteration and submit it for a claim.

Yes.. But that's not what I was replying to. I was replying to the person who said: "or your bank got made outside the identified batch of serials."

Serials outside the recall batch should report back "serial not valid for refund" or "serial belongs to equipment made outside the recall range" or any one of a thousand different variations that would convey accurate / useful information. What they should not do is report back as "already claimed".

Your scenario is the most likely explanation of exactly what happened. The 'tard who did the coding didn't account for the fact that there'd be humans involved in this process and some of those humans would be less than honest. So yeah, someone probably just started incrementing serials...

I'm aware of the US's actions in a majority of the world. That doesn't change what China did. One of your fellow Chinese shills just tried that shit and posted a link to a denial page that contained dozens of links to news stories from that time. Only every single article I read talked about how China exploited the technicality of the massacre not happening inside the invisible boundaries of Tienanmen Square to claim that no massacre had happened at all. Yet a massacre had happened. The China of 1989 was arguably way more dictatorial than it is today. Hell, that government was populated with Mao's peers, companions, and compatriots.

Try again, shill boy. I watched that shit happen on Live TV.

Beijing cut you a check directly or they pay you in bitcoin?

I'm not the person complaining, so why the hell are you replying to my comment?

I have to ask this: Are you on drugs? Did you read ANY of those fucking articles? I clicked your link.. I chose two random "links to reporter's own stories" and NEITHER contained any denial of the massacre. Variations in the numbers reported, yes... But no denials. Have you ever bothered to fucking read any of what you just tried to pass off as "it didn't happen and these people said it didn't happen"

Let's take a block of text from the very first link:
BBC NEWS: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square” — BBC reporter, James Miles, wrote in 2009.

Had you the fucking brain cells to read your own bullshit, you'd have seen that he explains how the INITIAL MISTAKE in the reports that the massacre was happening in the Square itself was exploited by the Chinese to claim no massacre had happened at all. A few lousy fucking paragraphs below that he explains how there was a fucking massacre you retarded clown.

Four fucking sentences from the bottom of the article: There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre.

Yes... But there is a difference between that and "spying on your communications". Knowing where I live is different than knowing the contents of my house. Knowing who I am talking to is different than knowing what I am talking about

Sure.. But that should be a different error message than "serial number already claimed".... We have language for a reason. "Invalid Serial" or "One Serial Per Addressee" or "One Serial per email address". At a bare minimum, you use error messages that actually convey what the error is.

Most certainly there were some that failed and were not reported. Maybe even a majority of them, but that'd be pure speculation. What is a nearly 100% certainty is that sometimes people don't go through all the steps to report a defective product....

Are you of the delusional that a "warranty period" lets the company off the hook for creating a product that will spontaneously burst into fire?

So the system responded that it was an already claimed serial number and not an invalid serial number? Who the fuck would do that?

And how do you suppose those bad actors are going to spy on your communications? What sites are you going to, for communications, (or anything important for that matter) that don't use SSL?

Tienanmen Square, you fucking retard.

So seventy years isn't still the early days? We almost done with it?

The liar would be you, if either of you is lying. There has been more than 70 years of computer development, advancement, innovation, etc and only a complete retard would think that someone, a few hundred years from now, wouldn't describe this era as the "early days of computing before everything went quantum" or photonic or insert-your-own-techy-sounding-word... Point is, one human lifetime is hardly "old" in the context of anything beyond an actual human.

Quit being a cunt. We're in the very early days of AI. Given that we don't have a general AI that can match a fruit-fly in actual intelligence, what the fuck would you call this? Near the end? Mid-point? C'mon, clue the rest of us in.. Tell the rest of us this isn't near the beginning because the development is nearly done...

When you say stuff like that... you know.... just pull something out of your ass that has no basis in reality, do you believe it? Are you of the opinion that the rest of us here on Slashdot don't have access to the rest of the internet? Do you think none of us has access to the vast amount of information that resides on aforementioned internet?

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) investigation of Enron released over 150,000 scanned pages in TIFF format of documents provided during the investigation. These were related to the western energy crisis.
The Enron email corpus contains a large number of email messages but is not measured in pages. Estimates vary, but it's reported as containing over 600,000 emails generated by 158 employees.
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations: During their investigation, this subcommittee collected and examined over two million pages of documents and released over 5,000 pages of testimony and exhibits.
Enron Securities Class Action: Attorneys reviewed 70 million pages.

For a company that didn't like keeping files, they sure kept a lot of files..... Or maybe they did like to keep files and you're an idiot... Which is it?

WTF? When has any inanimate object ever been required to follow a law? Do you think an AI is a person?