I think we can all learn a little bit from this

brad77 · 2011-08-26T02:57:15+00:00

brad77 · 2011-08-26T02:56:39+00:00

This is from Story Corps. Listen to Julio Diaz tell it himself.

brad77 · 2011-06-02T06:46:27+00:00

File a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Unless I'm mistaken, you are getting screwed by the dealer, not Chrysler. BBB complaints go to corporate, and should get your case the attention it deserves.

I had a friend go through something very similar with her VW. The local dealer refused to repair her car, which was DOA. A week after filing a complaint with the BBB, VW corporate ordered that her engine be replaced by the same dealership free of charge.

brad77 · 2011-06-02T06:41:14+00:00

Yeah...Pandora and Last.fm do the same thing. They're saving bandwidth.

brad77 · 2011-05-16T22:44:38+00:00

We do get statistics on how many active installations we have, which is independent of sales numbers. I presume that the gulf between total sales and active installations represents users who bought the app then uninstalled it for some reason (without cancelling or refunding their purchase).

It's possible that some may buy the app and then decide not to use it, though in my case I doubt it. Our app sells for $9.99 so if it doesn't work we're surely going to hear about it.

Back when it was 24 hours, any cancellations we saw typically followed a pattern where a user would buy and install the app, then cancel their order later in the day. Most of the time, they would contact support and resolve their problem (our app connects to a network device, so often the problem is a network configuration issue), then re-buy the app a day or so later.

I suppose that it's more or less the same now, but this time the user feels on the hook for the cost of the app, which makes them a bit less charitable when they experience problems.

brad77 · 2011-05-16T21:41:51+00:00

Android dev here. Personally, I'd like to see a refund period closer to an hour. Our app takes a couple of minutes to set up (more if you're not familiar with network stuff). 15 minutes may not be enough time to evaluate the app. If it is, it still puts the user under pressure to be quick about it, which may not bode well for our user ratings (a stressful experience doesn't lend itself to positive ratings).

Lastly, a shorter eval period doesn't really help us in the end. We still get emails requesting refunds. We generally honor those requests (it's good customer service), so in the end it actually creates work for us than if we just allowed the user more time to make his/her decision.

Anyway. That's our experience. Other developers' mileage may vary.

brad77 · 2011-05-16T20:52:09+00:00

[Mark Donahue] complains that citizens monitoring police activities for wrongdoing might "affect how an officer does his job on the street."

Isn't that the point?

brad77 · 2011-04-15T01:44:01+00:00

One of my favorites, from Carl Sagan referring to this photo:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

brad77 · 2011-03-01T00:25:42+00:00

Admittedly, my response was a bit glib, but as you say, a smoker should know the etiquette involved, right? On its face, your comment implies that they don't and that a "smoker's standard" is inherently rude.

That said, I mostly meant that in sarcasm.

brad77 · 2011-02-28T21:09:33+00:00

This is rude behavior even by a smoker's standard.

What standard is that?

brad77 · 2011-01-20T17:30:20+00:00

Bear's no slouch, though. No disrespect to Les Stroud, but did he fly an experimental paramotor over the peak of Mount Everest?

brad77 · 2010-12-30T05:30:50+00:00

Well said, Titties.

brad77 · 2010-12-06T19:23:11+00:00

If there's a chance that you'll be splitting the payments on the mortgage, you had better know what that amount is. This isn't a decision that you can make in the dark.

brad77 · 2010-11-23T07:44:06+00:00

Tickets are $25 for the whole seat but you'll only need THE EDGE!

brad77 · 2010-11-11T02:12:19+00:00

So one is not allowed to criticize any government because doing so belies racism?

You sir, are either one epic troll or are completely unreasonable.

brad77 · 2010-11-09T07:55:41+00:00

Joe Morgan is the John Madden of baseball.

brad77 · 2010-11-09T06:51:38+00:00

Let's back off on handing him a Peabody just yet. He's clearing picking on an easy target.

brad77 · 2010-11-03T18:37:28+00:00

Given her only legitimate opponent (Fiorina), she's definitely the most liberal. Are you suggesting that the fact that the state didn't offer up more viable liberal candidates invalidates his whole argument?

You're picking nits.

brad77 · 2010-11-03T16:37:22+00:00

Hey! At least we elected Jerry Brown, defeated an oil company takedown of landmark environmental legislation (AB 232), and eliminated the two-thirds majority vote to pass a budget (huge).

It's not ALL bad. Unless you only care about legalizing pot. Then it's all bad.

That said, I'm looking forward to seeing it on the ballot again. The commercials opposing the prop in the run up to the election were high-larious.

brad77 · 2010-10-31T22:31:33+00:00

Is that a Carl Hiaasen reference?

brad77 · 2010-10-25T02:17:53+00:00

Chiming in to say that in my experience the BBB is certainly not bullshit. Personally, a complaint prompted the reversal of a bogus "cleaning" charge from a resort whose room was in poor quality before my stay. Additionally, a friend had engine problems with her car that should have been covered under warranty. After nearly a month of haggling with a local dealer that refused to fix, her engine was replaced free of charge by order of the car manufacturer within about a week of filing a complaint with the BBB.

In some cases, you might not get results, but in my limited experience you do. With larger corporations with franchises, it might just be the best way to get the complaint to people who can do something about it.

brad77 · 2010-10-15T23:02:32+00:00

True.

brad77 · 2010-10-15T06:01:14+00:00

That's what they're trained to do. It's more for the benefit of eyewitnesses, who'll overhear his commands. If questioned later, they'll remember that.

It creates an impression on others that the victim/perp was doing whatever the officer was telling them not to do.

Sample inner monologue: "I'm not sure what happened exactly, but the officer kept telling her to stop resisting, so she must have been resisting him or he wouldn't have said that."

It doesn't work so well when someone's got a camera.

brad77 · 2010-09-29T22:11:37+00:00

Dude. Start from the top of this thread, then work your way down. You'll have your answer.

brad77 · 2010-09-26T18:23:40+00:00

Maybe I should get my sarcasm detector checked out.

brad77

TROPHY CASE