All I ask is the ability to exclude a carrier. I would exclude USPS as long as I live in Dover because they will not deliver packages that are larger than will fit in the mailbox for anyone on this route. Everywhere else I've ever lived USPS will ring the bell if they have a package that won't fit but not here. Instead they scan the package AS DELIVERED (although to be fair to the carrier, she specifies "per supervisor") so that they don't look bad to Amazon, and leave a slip instructing us to pick the packages up. Oddly enough, they (USPS) will deliver to the door on this route on Sundays (wtf?)... but not any other day.

> Seriously, loosing the USPS won't be a good thing in the long run.

It depends on where you live.
Most places I've lived, USPS is every bit as good as UPS and FedEx where the carriers will ring your bell or at least honk the horn if they've got a package for you.

Now, I live in a city but on a "rural route" (in a city) and they will not ring the bell. Instead, they leave the little slip letting you know that they expect you to do their work for them and go pick up the package. I would not have a problem with this if the post office were open beyond bankers' hours... but they close early and I work until 6pm. How the fuck am I going to get my packages without taking time off of work?

To make things worse, they scan the packages as "delivered" - but in the particular carrier's defense, she notates it "scanned as delivered PER SUPERVISOR." One time I asked her about this, and she said she puts "PER SUPERVISOR" because she has been instructed to scan packages as delivered but she knows that is essentially mail fraud so she clarifies that it is per instruction of her supervisor. She said the reason her supervisor does this is to make them not look bad to Amazon, because she makes her do this for ALL customers on this route when the package will not fit in the mailbox. Her supervisor has instructed the staff to not even load the packages on the truck.

Fuck the USPS. The sooner we let them die the better.

You use it primarily in the winter months as a home heating source, I presume? ;)

It would be a bad idea to clean it now -- at this point the dirt is its primary structural element.

The above was a really good case study in business ecosystem dynamics.

When the Amiga 1000 came out, it was alien technology -- probably 10 years ahead of its time. The Amiga OCS chipset's graphics and sound hardware of its contemporary competitors look like historical artifacts, and it's OS was an actual pre-emptive multitasking operating system, not just a glorified disk loader.

However, any company in the world could design, build, and sell a new PC sound card or a new PC graphics card, any many of them did. The PC sound and graphics cards continued to suck (relative to the Amiga) for quite a while, but simply due to the fact that so many different companies had hired so many engineers to work on developing them, they improved every year, and eventually surpassed the capabilities of the Amiga sometime in the mid-90's.

Amiga's engineers were undoubtedly some of the most talented on the planet, but their small team eventually couldn't compete with the sheer numbers of PC-based engineers. By the time AGA came out, the writing was on the wall: An open system that gains traction will eventually outgrow and out-innovate a small, closed system, no matter how awesome the skills of the closed systems' engineers.

I have two different variants of the C64 and there was a later one (slightly off-white) that was in production for a long time.

Of course it will. They want to use a blockchain for maintaining an efficient high-speed ledger of all bank-to-bank transactions. When you do a funds transfer from, for your account to an account at another bank, they'll write an entry to the block chain and both parties will be able to validate the time at which the transaction occurred. Having an unforgeable ledger is the entire point of the system that they're proposing.

Your comment makes no sense. They're not talking about adopting BitCoin as a consumer payment system, they're talking about adopting some of the underlying technology for bank-to-bank transfers.

I'm surprised that it was that few. I remember seeing them for £50 in Argos about a decade after they were first released. They were incredibly popular as games machines and a load of shops had a row of C64 game tapes for around 50p each (NES games were around £10, if I remember correctly, at the same time).

There's no vast left- or right-wing media conspiracy. There's a small number of owners of the mainstream press, and they will not print anything that directly contradicts the interests of these owners. This has no allegiance to any political party or ideology other than a desire for certain individuals to increase their personal power.

Various governments have allowed mergers and acquisitions among news companies until there's very little independent press. Most countries don't want to regulate press freedom too heavily (for good reason - there's a very fine line between regulating truth in journalism and forcing propaganda and it's incredibly easy for the former to slip into the latter), so we're left with the majority of the population being informed by untrustworthy sources.

I find the map pretty surprising. Zoom in on the UK, and most of England is yellow (11-15 g/m3), but Reading (dense traffic, industrial areas, lots of diesel trains passing through) is green (<10), yet completely surrounded by yellow areas. I'd probably be inclined to trust the point samples, but their averaging between them looks like it's nonsense. The middle of Wales is pretty green, but with squares of yellow. The green makes sense (it's basically a big space full of hills and sheep), but the yellow doesn't seem to correspond with any human habitation or industry.

Indeed. Under the Consumer Rights Act and the earlier Sale of Goods Act, you are entitled to a refund for a variety of reasons. Any claims made by the seller that influenced your decision and are false gives you grounds for a refund (or a replacement with a version that meets these requirements). I had the battery on an Apple laptop fail after the warranty expired, but because of the SoGA they replaced it without quibble: their website claimed that it would retain 80% of its charge after 300 discharge cycles and the system monitor showed that it was retaining about 15% of its charge after about 120 complete cycles.

By moving to a new nation whose founding father is Elon Musk?

Parent is talking about picking amazon over walmart and staples. Excuse me as I shed a tear for these beleaguered small businesses that are above reproach in their business practices.

Same experience here. I joined prime last year when I moved and needed lots of items quickly and recently canceled. My post-prime shipping is markedly slower - the range of expected delivery is way longer and it nearly always falls at the tail end instead of the front end as it did in the past.

It has alienated me as a customer, I felt that they were attempting to manipulate me into re-priming so now I simply avoid doing business with them unless there is no alternative. Sometimes when I am forced to buy from amazon the price I find with shipping is cheaper than the Prime price, Lolzors!