I played one (1) game of Age of Mythology. Just too busy to play much more. I do so enjoy it when I get the time though. It was a win, but I looked up my opponent afterwards and it was only their 4th or 5th game.

Also finally got back out an went for a run today, for the first time since the start of the month.

To be fair this is a very early post. It’s 10:30 pm here as I write this in Australia, and the post reads “2 hours”. So that means it’s set for somewhere 4 hours ahead of me, or UTC+14, the very earliest time zone there is, home to the Line Islands of Kiribati, and nowhere else.

It might be a bit more difficult for them than for Woolies and Coles, sure. But Australia is unique in how strong Colesworths are, and yet in other countries, as demonstrated in the video linked above, stores are able to have scan & go tech.

Granted, there are a whole bunch of other factors in the Australian market that make it way worse than it needs to be, like our restrictive zoning practices that promote driving to big supermarkets rather than stopping off at your local small store on the ride home or walk back from the train/tram/bus stop. But the bottom line in terms of their inability to provide customer conveniences is that if stores in a country that is both less centralised and lower population can do it, there’s really no excuse here. Pubs and clubs have gotten on board with it via the prevalence of QR codes to order food, despite menus being unique to every place. Maccas manages to have a pretty damn good app experience despite prices and menus varying somewhat between stores and being largely franchise-owned.

They don’t need to spend millions developing this for themselves. A quick search turns up numerous different while-label services that can do this for you. I don’t know exactly how much they cost or how hard they are to integrate, but I know I would be way more likely to go to somewhere other than Colesworth if the experience didn’t suck arse. Last time I went to my local local store (there’s also an IGA pretty nearby that I do visit from time-to-time, but this was a fully independent local grocer) they refused to check me out at all because I didn’t have cash, and they only accepted cash for small purchases.

Your last paragraph is a good point, and is yet another reason that the government should structure its laws and enforcement to help promote these smaller businesses rather than CostlesWorthdi. But I think it’s unlikely to sway very many shoppers.

I get the joke, but actually…yes. A co-op doesn’t mean the people actually doing the work don’t get paid. It actually doesn’t even mean not-for-profit, just that the people profiting aren’t shareholders, but people who actually have a direct stake in the business. That can be a customer-owned co-op, supplier-owned, worker-owned, or some combination of those. Those groups would be the ones making any profit, in a for-profit co-op. And in a not-for-profit worker- or supplier-owned co-op, the workers (including the CEO) and suppliers still get paid—they’re just able to be paid more while selling goods for the same price, or paid the same while achieving a lower price, than a non-co-op business would.

Strip any tracking parameters you spot before following any URLs.

If it’s one of these QR codes at a restaurant for ordering, the parameters could possibly be necessary to properly connect your order to your table, depending on how they’re set up.

Sorry, I thought we were having a civilised conversation about how a known problem could be solved. Not being rude arseholes slinging insults at each other and using the tired right-wing “ignore evidence from elsewhere in the world because we’re special” bullshit as justification.

I’m struggling to remember a time when I’ve wanted to look at a price for a grocery item online. I’ve never done direct to boot.

Ok, that’s fantastic for you. I love direct to boot, and I specifically avoid my local IGA because even though they do have self checkout (only installed around the last year or so), it always seems to be roped off when I go. Not sure if that’s just because I only tend to go late at night when they have the fewest people rostered on. I don’t actually care about checking the prices online because I’m financially secure enough that I’m lucky enough not to actually care but if I did care a lot about the price, I would definitely be wanting to be able to check where I’m going to get the best deal. But I do like being able to check which products they’ve got so I can plan my shop. This is especially important for smaller stores where I might need to plan to go to a bunch of different stores to get all the stuff I need.

Maybe I’m wrong and this wouldn’t actually help them. But it’s clear that people aren’t convinced by them doing what they currently do, and that they need to try something new. Maybe getting speciality lines could work, like Aldi does with their centre aisle, which clearly works very well for them. But “focusing on local products” has been the primary selling point of smaller supermarkets and independent grocers for decades, and clearly does not work.

As for it being “too expensive”, if companies in countries that have a smaller population than ours and lack the strong duopoly of Colesworths can develop or purchase scan & go tech 3 or 4 years before Woolworths started doing it here, I refuse to believe that’s actually the real problem. I suspect smaller business owners in Australia are just more likely to be technophobic and to believe that it’s sound business to ignore technology than small companies in Europe.

I have no idea what the law is in India, but if he got a “hacking” charge for this it would be a gross miscarriage of justice, considering he never once did anything resembling social engineering, brute forcing passwords, any sort of injection attack, or anything else that might actually be involved in hacking.

However, assuming he never tried to reach out to the company themselves first (and I saw no indication in the article that he had), this is really quite a horrible irresponsible disclosure. It’s pretty obviously a significant leak of sensitive data—both customer and business data—and giving them 90 days to fix it before alerting the public to what you found is pretty basic security ethics.

gronp

The smaller guys need to do a better job at providing a good service though, too. Small local grocery stores have had scan & go options for half a decade overseas, something that Woolies only started rolling out last year, and no other store in Australia has, to my knowledge. The big guys also have options like regular self-checkout, checking prices & stock online/in-app, and direct-to-boot ordering. These are all things that smaller guys could reasonably fix, to varying degrees

Much harder for the small guys to fix is the fact that Colesworth are more likely to be a one-stop-shop place. They’re huge, and with that comes a huge range of stock. Supporting your local grocer is fine, but might then mean you have to make a separate trip to a baker and butcher. Given these less-easily-surmountable drawback, it just becomes extra important that they don’t fall behind in things they can control. But they do.

This has been a thing since at least Star Trek: TOS. It’s just more prominent today as online culture becomes more ubiquitous and makes it easier for more people who aren’t quite as dedicated to get involved.

I hope this backfires on them. Much more expensive for them to fight hundreds of court cases than just 1, if those employees can find someone to bankroll their suits.

AO3 is a website for sharing fanfiction. Archive of Our Own.

Slash fiction is a subgenre of fanfiction focused on romance, because for example you might describe your fanfiction as “Kirk/Spock” (pronounced “Kirk slash Spock”).

“Shipping” is the act of supporting a “ship”, short for “relationship”. It can be in fanfiction or just in fan discussions. It may or may not be supporting the “canon” ships, which are relationships actually shown in the original story. (Kirk/Spock is absolutely non-canon, but Picard/Crusher is a canon ship.)

Sometimes ships get given names, which might be a portmanteau of the characters’ names (Castle and Beckett from the show Castle being “Casket”), or associated with a characteristic of the characters (“rocketship” is Team Rocket characters Jessie and James from Pokémon), or reference something that happened to the characters in universe (Young Justice’s “Spitfire” referencing romantic advice given to Wally West that in part lead to him getting romantically involved with Artemis).

Even if you’re not particularly interested in shipping, if you get involved in online communities discussing long-running series, you’re bound to become familiar with it.

No irony, I didn’t say straight because I didn’t mean straight. I meant exactly what I said: you can get from one point to another without crossing a line. Because if you have to cross a line, you’ve either moved into a different shape (in the case of two adjoining shapes) or moves into empty space.

As it was presented in the OP, I don’t think it is a shape. If I get two squares and stick them next to each other so one side of each is touching, have I suddenly got one rectangle? Or do I still have two squares with a border between them?

Someone else posted an amended version with the internal lines removed. The equivalent of taking those two squares and removing the border between them, so you would have just one rectangle.

You’re the second person to have made that suggestion to me, but no.

Uhh, no. A crescent is a classic concave shape, but you can travel from any point to any other in a crescent without crossing a line, because it’s a single enclosed shape.

Huh? Of course it is. A star is, so long as you don’t draw it out of two interlocking triangles, or construct it from 5 straight lines, and leave the internal parts of those lines intact. A crescent just…is. Unless you’re trying to claim the stars that sometimes appear with a crescent (e.g. on some Islamic country’s flags) are a part of the crescent itself.

Does this even meet the criteria for “a shape”? I’d have thought you need to be able to travel from any point within the shape to any other point, without crossing a line.