The CS email is a buch of garbage that makes no sense.
So... pretty much like every other customer service email from any major company that asks any sort of question more complex than "Where do I click to [insert action here]?" Just saying.
You're seeing it because it successfully passes through the artificial lens where previously it was either reflected, diffused, or absorbed by your body's natural lens.
If the natural lens absorbed or reflected the UV, this means that your retina is receiving significantly more UV with the artificial lens.
If the natural lens merely diffused the UV (which seems somewhat unlikely), then your retina is probably getting more UV than it did before (because some of it would have hit other parts of the eye), and is also getting more intense UV in certain spots than it did before, but less intense UV in other spots. IIRC, a shorter exposure time increases the risk of cancer even if the total exposure is the same.
Difficulty seeing in a high-UV environment would be the least of my worries. If I found myself suddenly able to see UV, I'd be more worried about the increased risk of getting cancer of the optic nerve.
Because UV is generally considered to be moderately dangerous, I would argue that this is a design flaw in the replacement lenses, and an easily fixable flaw at that. Until the manufacturer realizes their mistake, you should always wear a pair of clear glasses or sunglasses with a UV-opaque coating (on the outside) and an anti-glare coating (on the inside) to reduce the risk of permanent damage to your eyes.
I'm setting up a remote control system that controls my TV, Blu-Ray player, and MythTV box (and my DirecTV receiver in one room) using rooted Nook Simple Touch tablets and Opera Mobile as web-based controllers. Right now, I'm using my Mac Mini MythTV front ends to handle the requests, but it would be better to have something that draws less power than the Mini.
In theory, I could use an R-Pi in one room, but the power savings for a few extra weeks with one device probably won't pay for the difference in shipping. Besides, if I reconfigure one room differently, that means extra work every time I tweak the system. Better to just wait until I have all three sets of final hardware and do the transition all at once.
I think you missed my point, which was that it may not sell out quickly because a lot of folks may elect to wait to buy their first unit until after those quantity limits are lifted.
This is just the first batch, it's expected to sell out very fast. They've done what they can to get as many people one (IE: limit one per customer until supply catches up with demand) but Slashdot alone likely has 10,000 readers that plan to buy one, never mind the rest of the world.
Maybe. Then again, they may find that most of their potential buyers have projects in mind that require more than one unit. For example, I need a minimum of three just to get started with the project I have in mind.
Your kids almost certainly aren't the ones dressing up like a hooker and posting pics on Facebook. Hint: my rant was not directed at you or your kids.
I agree with you that the law is problematically broken as designed and has unfortunate edge case problems. That might have some bearing on the legality of pics after they cross a certain line. It doesn't have any bearing on why those pics exist in the first place.
The latter problem is caused by two things: 1. really lousy role models coming from the entertainment industry and 2. parents who leave their kids in front of the TV all day and use it to babysit their kids and teach them values instead of doing it themselves, thus causing those kids to excessively idolize those poor role models.
The only way to fix that is for all (or at least the majority) of the parents in the world to break the cycle of those bad influences early and often. Sure, it may not always work in every individual case, but if everyone as a society agrees to try, over the course of decades, things will improve on the whole. If we as a society do not, things will almost certainly continue to worsen.
BTW, the ideal age of reproduction is getting earlier and earlier, as is the age at which they start to be interested in sex. The main reason this is such a problem is that kids today are physically maturing sooner, but are maturing emotionally later. Although one could argue that this is a good reason to protect them from sex until their mid-twenties, one could also argue that the late emotional development is a problem that needs to be fixed, and soon, before we end up a world populated by 50-year-old children....:-)
And no, I'm not naïve. None of the things I describe will keep teenagers from having sex. Being sexually active is not the same thing as being sexually promiscuous and overt. The former is common and natural. The latter is usually a sign of an underlying problem that needs to be addressed, whether that's drinking, drug abuse, or serious self esteem problems.
Who said anything about lifting the print from the sensor? The owner has been holding the phone. There are bound to be full sets of prints all over it.... Not to mention that glass at the bar, the steering wheel, the door handle....
Now, if we could get the folks who market jeans and other clothing to teens to stop using sexually suggestive images of people under 18 . ..
...or get the parents to stop letting their kids dress that way. We're not talking about kiddie porn here where someone is being abused. We're talking about idiot teens dressing like hookers by choice, posting pics of it, and then everybody getting all up in arms because those pics get spread around. Don't want those sorts of pics to be so common? Try telling your kids "no" once in a while. Just saying.
Treating the symptom doesn't cure the disease. The pictures are the symptom.
This assumes the merchant is reliable too. Amazon may not be bad for returns, but ebay/paypal can be pretty awful for both buyers and sellers.
Your first mistake was calling eBay a merchant. It is not. It is a global flea market.
You have to wait for the item, then go through the RMA process, return the item, and wait for refund/replacement.
Amazon cross-ships the replacement. This means that if the original product partially works, you can continue using it while you wait for the replacement, and even in the worst case, you'll get the replacement only a few days after you got the first one.
And any security measure, once deployed broadly enough, becomes very nearly useless at achieving that goal. Indeed, the only reason passwords aren't basically useless is that users can choose arbitrarily long passwords, up to the limit of their memory, which means that they aren't deployed evenly....
When additional security is deployed broadly and evenly, the only thing it really does is raise the minimum level of knowledge required to break the system. Depending on the level of cooperation among thieves, this may or may not decrease the number of potential attackers. Thus, such additions quickly yield diminishing returns. And to date, no security system has proven very resistant to the wrench attack with the exception of possibly dividing the key among multiple people, and even then, this is only resistant given a limited number of wrenches/wielders and a large number of uncaring keyholders.
About the best we can do is to avoid the sorts of fraud that occur because of snooping. Require encryption for online stores (we pretty much do that anyway) and require proper encryption between things like ATMs and the banks that service them (I remember reading that this is not always the case). Ultimately, if your endpoint is cracked, you're screwed no matter what, for the same reason that DRM is impossible. The only way to reduce that significantly is to make a physically secure endpoint do more work (e.g. an RFID card that signs a message and returns the signature).
Even that sort of scheme, however, can be compromised if you compromise the reader and pre-prepare someone else's transaction to run against the card at the same time in the background. So in effect, if your phone, the ATM, or the card reader at the grocery store is compromised, you're thoroughly screwed. There's just no way to fix that (or even significantly improve upon it), so why bother trying? You would do far better to spend your time improving the physical security and tamper resistance of the phone, the ATM, and the card reader at the grocery instead.
Do you know how easy it is to lift a thumb print? Or how unlikely it is that you would generate the same key from that print reproducibly? Biometrics are less than useless for security purposes because they cannot readily be changed, but can be readily stolen.
The only hardware feature that actually increases security usefully is the use of devices like CryptoCard/SecurID tokens—non-networked devices that produce a different (but predictable) number each time. Unfortunately, it only helps if the bad guys don't know to steal it.
Once the bad guys know to steal it, the only thing standing between them and your money is the account name and a (usually four-digit) pin. They can usually guess the account name; worse, if they have access to your phone, they can probably scrape the account name out of memory. This leaves four digits as the sum total of your security.
This is why large transactions should always be verified with a call to your home phone, and funds should not be transferred until someone gets home and calls the number to verify it, providing the passcode that they leave on your answering machine. And even then, it's probably not all that secure if there is any way to get your home phone number from any card stripe in your billfold.
This is also why credit card companies put the onus of identity verification on the merchant. Unfortunately, for online transactions, fraud is inevitable, which is why some merchants will only ship to the billing address, require a phone call to the billing phone number prior to shipping, etc.
Most online stores these days offer free shipping, and many (Amazon, for example) will even eat the shipping cost for returns. And yet they still come out cheaper than local stores in many cases. So I don't think #4 really applies as often as it used to.
#3 doesn't always apply, either. Many people go to the local store to see the product, then order it online when they see how much more expensive it is locally. In effect, #3 only applies when #2 also applies, making #3 irrelevant.
I would say that #1 is the most important thing in a local store—having a wide enough selection to meet the customer's needs most of the time. Fry's = good. Best Buy = screwed.
That's a minor part of their business these days. AFAIK, a big chunk of their income comes from the money they get from the cellular companies every time they convince someone to sign up for phone service.
Of course, if you're the only source for a product in town, even low sales volume can be sustainable if you charge a high enough markup.
Between Fry's and Radio Shack, I've generally been able to find most of the components I need for most hobby projects. They have a pretty good selection of resistors, capacitors, etc. as long as they have them in stock. Unfortunately, it often takes two or three stores to find them in sufficient quantity. Hint: for components, always go to Campbell. Never go to Sunnyvale. YMMV with San Jose.
I've never seen this, and I return defective products to Fry's at least three or four times per year. If you tell them the item is defective, they put a sticker on it, but the sticker says "Return to vendor". They only stick the rebate sticker on it if you tell them you changed your mind about it. So either you weren't clear enough when you told them that it was defective, or you went to a Fry's store that is poorly run compared with my local store.
I'm dubious about returns because I worry about parts being missing, and I'm dubious about returned hard drives because I wonder if the previous customer dropped them, but for most things, the sticker of doom doesn't bother me too much. Usually it just means that I saved a couple of bucks.
That said, it may depend on the store. Which Fry's store was this?
I agree with you except for #2 and #3. Those are the exact opposite of what they should do. The biggest thing that drives me to buy stuff online is lack of selection at local stores.
When it comes to buying expensive electronics, I spend the time to research and figure out what I want ahead of time, and then I look online to see what local stores have the product I chose. If none of them do, I order online.
When it comes to cheaper stuff (under $50), I usually go to Fry's, in part because their prices tend to be better than most other stores, but largely because they have a much broader selection than any other store, and it pisses me off to have to go to two or three stores just to find a $5 cable. If they don't have something that meets my needs, my next stop is usually Amazon, because if Fry's doesn't have it, odds are good that nobody else will have it locally.
The problem is, when I have to order online, it is usually because they didn't have one small part of a much larger order. If I have to wait a week to get some of the parts for a project, I might as well wait for all of them. This means that whenever Fry's does not have one item, they typically lose the sale of five or six more, on average. Thus, having a broad selection is the only thing preventing them from being completely overtaken by Amazon and other online retailers.
To put it in perspective, the smallest Fry's store I've ever been in was at least three times the size of the largest Best Buy store I've ever been in. This is why they are a decent place to buy electronics and Best Buy sucks. You cannot have adequate selection of electronics in a store the size of Best Buy. Making it smaller and further reducing the selection can only make it less likely that I'll find what I'm looking for, and thus more likely that I'll eventually stop bothering to try that store at all (and, frankly, BB is already too small for me to bother with it).
With consistently higher prices and terrible customer service policies, I can't imagine how Best Buy has stayed in business as long as they have. There's a reason I've always called them "Worst Buy". They usually are.
To give you an idea of their customer service, I priced a product online with Google, and it told me that Best Buy had it for a great price. I went there, and found that they had just raised their price by nearly a hundred bucks. I knew this because they had a recently returned unit available for less than their previous price. I bought the returned unit.
Unfortunately, it was defective (flaky HDMI output). At most stores, when a product is DOA, you can go in and they'll swap it out with a working one. Not at Best Buy. Because they didn't have any more customer-returned products from when the price was lower, my only option (at their store) was to pay an extra $120 to get a working product.
I pointed out that their new, higher price was about thirty or forty dollars higher than Fry's, just two blocks away, and over a hundred dollars higher than Amazon. Needless to say, I opted for a refund.
I then drove to Fry's. They matched Amazon's price, so I ended up getting it for almost exactly what Best Buy had been charging two weeks earlier.
Why anyone ever darkens the door of Best Buy is beyond me. I could see buying stuff like DVDs from Best Buy online (where you can price compare easily), but just walking into the store, your odds of getting even an acceptable deal are right up there with winning the lottery.
Utimately, the "it's too expensive" justification for piracy is just a lazy excuse used by somebody who figures that, for whatever reason, they have a right to take something simply because they can.
Tell that to the college students who can barely afford their tuition. Even the student editions of Photoshop, at $199, is solidly a factor of ten more than is realistic for most students. That approaches the cost of the textbooks for an entire quarter or semester, and that's before you factor in the fact that they get some of that money back when they sell the books back.
The bigger problem is that the piracy that was actually excusable when they were in school becomes the normal way that they obtain software going forward. There is exactly one solution that will fix that, which is to charge only low double-digit dollars for your app, at least to students, so that most of them will buy legitimate copies instead of pirating them. When those students graduate, if they still need the app, they will be used to paying for it, and will be more likely to buy it (at upgrade pricing). This approach requires practically giving away the software, though, which is why most businesses are too scared to attempt it.
I take it you know a lot of people who would steal a car, a television, or a DVD.... Assuming they could get away with it, I mean....
People like that are going to steal or pirate no matter what the manufacturers/distributors do, and if they can't steal or pirate one thing, they'll steal or pirate something else. They still won't pay for any of it as long as there are free alternatives. There will always be free alternatives. Therefore, that portion of the pirate market is not only unavoidable, but also utterly irrelevant to any discussion of piracy.
Price hikes on eBooks over the past year have triggered significant increases in piracy.
The two most pirated app are Photoshop and AutoCAD, which are also two of the most expensive apps.
In general, it looks to me like there is a strong correlation between price and piracy rate. Now you might argue that both the high price and the high piracy rate are caused by high utility, but both of those products are relatively niche products used by a small percentage of computer users. How can they have dramatically higher utility than, for example, Microsoft Office? Clearly, this is not the case. Yet Office gets pirated much, much less than Photoshop. Why? Most likely because it costs a lot less.
More to the point, this wasn't always the case. A decade ago, Office was one of the most highly pirated apps out there. Then Microsoft started making it available at a lower cost. For example, in China (where piracy was rampant), they lowered the retail price to $29. Now, they have a much lower rate of piracy. I'd say their experience pretty solidly refutes your assertion that lowering prices doesn't reduce piracy.
Now I'm not saying that lowering prices will always reduce piracy. I'm sure you can find some situations where lowering the price does not decrease piracy rates—the app's utility might be relatively low (and thus worth almost nothing to its users), the app might be a buggy piece of garbage that nobody is willing to pay for, or there might be artificial impediments to its legal purchase (e.g. sold exclusively with expensive hardware, sold only to people in a particular field, sold only as part of a larger collection/album/set, etc.). And there is certainly a point of diminishing returns beyond which lowering the price won't reduce piracy further. Most software, movies, and music are nowhere near that point, though, as far as I can tell.
...in fact, as the price is lowered, often the net amount of piracy on the work increases, because although the number of people that that buy it increase with increased affordability, a certain percentage of the new purchasers acquired will also make unauthorized copies of it, and distribute it to others, making it even easier for people who want to get it for free to do so).
That's completely wrong in the modern era. It might have been true when content was pirated by swapping disks around at a user group meeting. With P2P piracy, content remains available as long as there is at least one complete copy among all of the people who are trying to download it and/or are still seeding it after finishing their download. Thus, the number of original copies is meaningless; it only takes one purchaser to make the content available to everyone. After that, for the most part, none of the people making unauthorized copies are people who purchased a copy.
Therefore, to the extent that lowering the price increases piracy rates, it is not because it is easier to find a pirated copy, but rather it is an externality caused by more purchasers recommending it to more people, a greater number of whom are people who would not have even considered the work otherwise. Thus, when lowering prices increases piracy, it solidly supports my assertion that few of the people who pirate books, movies, or music would have bought the work, making all the industry's whining and kvetching utterly without merit.
Obligation, no. But if it became safer to steal cable overnight, and if more people then stole it, I think you'd find that most of the people stealing it were those who currently use an over-the-air antenna. In other words, the market would be almost exactly the same as it is today as far as the cable company is concerned. As such, they would not suddenly earn the right to whine about all those evil cable thieves taking away their business.
More to the point, if they then decided that they wanted to turn those new cable thieves (who previously used an antenna) into paying customers rather than merely turning them back into over-the-air antenna users, their only viable option for doing so would be to lower prices. No amount of cracking down on them will improve their bottom line so long as free or significantly cheaper alternatives exist (even if those alternatives are inferior).
No, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if the vast majority of people are stealing your service rather than paying for it, it is safe to assume that your price is too high. The fact that only a handful of people steal cable is evidence that their price is roughly reasonable.
I'm also saying that your comparison is flawed because it does not take into account differences between the two markets. In cable, very few people steal it because they are so easily caught. The cable companies are thus forced to compete in a purely capitalistic universe in which the number of people who get their product is dependent on how well they price it. By contrast, the number of people who watch a movie is not dependent upon price. At all. Even if you only consider the number of people who buy a movie and loan it out to their friends (which is legal, unlike loaning out your cable service). Only the number of people who pay for the movie is dependent on price, not the number of people who consume it.
This fundamental difference between the inherent nature of selling a service (cable TV) and selling a product (a movie) makes your analogy completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
So... pretty much like every other customer service email from any major company that asks any sort of question more complex than "Where do I click to [insert action here]?" Just saying.
You're seeing it because it successfully passes through the artificial lens where previously it was either reflected, diffused, or absorbed by your body's natural lens.
If the natural lens absorbed or reflected the UV, this means that your retina is receiving significantly more UV with the artificial lens.
If the natural lens merely diffused the UV (which seems somewhat unlikely), then your retina is probably getting more UV than it did before (because some of it would have hit other parts of the eye), and is also getting more intense UV in certain spots than it did before, but less intense UV in other spots. IIRC, a shorter exposure time increases the risk of cancer even if the total exposure is the same.
Either way, it's not good.
Difficulty seeing in a high-UV environment would be the least of my worries. If I found myself suddenly able to see UV, I'd be more worried about the increased risk of getting cancer of the optic nerve.
Because UV is generally considered to be moderately dangerous, I would argue that this is a design flaw in the replacement lenses, and an easily fixable flaw at that. Until the manufacturer realizes their mistake, you should always wear a pair of clear glasses or sunglasses with a UV-opaque coating (on the outside) and an anti-glare coating (on the inside) to reduce the risk of permanent damage to your eyes.
I'm setting up a remote control system that controls my TV, Blu-Ray player, and MythTV box (and my DirecTV receiver in one room) using rooted Nook Simple Touch tablets and Opera Mobile as web-based controllers. Right now, I'm using my Mac Mini MythTV front ends to handle the requests, but it would be better to have something that draws less power than the Mini.
In theory, I could use an R-Pi in one room, but the power savings for a few extra weeks with one device probably won't pay for the difference in shipping. Besides, if I reconfigure one room differently, that means extra work every time I tweak the system. Better to just wait until I have all three sets of final hardware and do the transition all at once.
I think you missed my point, which was that it may not sell out quickly because a lot of folks may elect to wait to buy their first unit until after those quantity limits are lifted.
Maybe. Then again, they may find that most of their potential buyers have projects in mind that require more than one unit. For example, I need a minimum of three just to get started with the project I have in mind.
Your kids almost certainly aren't the ones dressing up like a hooker and posting pics on Facebook. Hint: my rant was not directed at you or your kids.
I agree with you that the law is problematically broken as designed and has unfortunate edge case problems. That might have some bearing on the legality of pics after they cross a certain line. It doesn't have any bearing on why those pics exist in the first place.
The latter problem is caused by two things: 1. really lousy role models coming from the entertainment industry and 2. parents who leave their kids in front of the TV all day and use it to babysit their kids and teach them values instead of doing it themselves, thus causing those kids to excessively idolize those poor role models.
The only way to fix that is for all (or at least the majority) of the parents in the world to break the cycle of those bad influences early and often. Sure, it may not always work in every individual case, but if everyone as a society agrees to try, over the course of decades, things will improve on the whole. If we as a society do not, things will almost certainly continue to worsen.
BTW, the ideal age of reproduction is getting earlier and earlier, as is the age at which they start to be interested in sex. The main reason this is such a problem is that kids today are physically maturing sooner, but are maturing emotionally later. Although one could argue that this is a good reason to protect them from sex until their mid-twenties, one could also argue that the late emotional development is a problem that needs to be fixed, and soon, before we end up a world populated by 50-year-old children.... :-)
And no, I'm not naïve. None of the things I describe will keep teenagers from having sex. Being sexually active is not the same thing as being sexually promiscuous and overt. The former is common and natural. The latter is usually a sign of an underlying problem that needs to be addressed, whether that's drinking, drug abuse, or serious self esteem problems.
Who said anything about lifting the print from the sensor? The owner has been holding the phone. There are bound to be full sets of prints all over it.... Not to mention that glass at the bar, the steering wheel, the door handle....
...or get the parents to stop letting their kids dress that way. We're not talking about kiddie porn here where someone is being abused. We're talking about idiot teens dressing like hookers by choice, posting pics of it, and then everybody getting all up in arms because those pics get spread around. Don't want those sorts of pics to be so common? Try telling your kids "no" once in a while. Just saying.
Treating the symptom doesn't cure the disease. The pictures are the symptom.
Your first mistake was calling eBay a merchant. It is not. It is a global flea market.
Amazon cross-ships the replacement. This means that if the original product partially works, you can continue using it while you wait for the replacement, and even in the worst case, you'll get the replacement only a few days after you got the first one.
This is why you spin around repeatedly first.
And any security measure, once deployed broadly enough, becomes very nearly useless at achieving that goal. Indeed, the only reason passwords aren't basically useless is that users can choose arbitrarily long passwords, up to the limit of their memory, which means that they aren't deployed evenly....
When additional security is deployed broadly and evenly, the only thing it really does is raise the minimum level of knowledge required to break the system. Depending on the level of cooperation among thieves, this may or may not decrease the number of potential attackers. Thus, such additions quickly yield diminishing returns. And to date, no security system has proven very resistant to the wrench attack with the exception of possibly dividing the key among multiple people, and even then, this is only resistant given a limited number of wrenches/wielders and a large number of uncaring keyholders.
About the best we can do is to avoid the sorts of fraud that occur because of snooping. Require encryption for online stores (we pretty much do that anyway) and require proper encryption between things like ATMs and the banks that service them (I remember reading that this is not always the case). Ultimately, if your endpoint is cracked, you're screwed no matter what, for the same reason that DRM is impossible. The only way to reduce that significantly is to make a physically secure endpoint do more work (e.g. an RFID card that signs a message and returns the signature).
Even that sort of scheme, however, can be compromised if you compromise the reader and pre-prepare someone else's transaction to run against the card at the same time in the background. So in effect, if your phone, the ATM, or the card reader at the grocery store is compromised, you're thoroughly screwed. There's just no way to fix that (or even significantly improve upon it), so why bother trying? You would do far better to spend your time improving the physical security and tamper resistance of the phone, the ATM, and the card reader at the grocery instead.
Do you know how easy it is to lift a thumb print? Or how unlikely it is that you would generate the same key from that print reproducibly? Biometrics are less than useless for security purposes because they cannot readily be changed, but can be readily stolen.
The only hardware feature that actually increases security usefully is the use of devices like CryptoCard/SecurID tokens—non-networked devices that produce a different (but predictable) number each time. Unfortunately, it only helps if the bad guys don't know to steal it.
Once the bad guys know to steal it, the only thing standing between them and your money is the account name and a (usually four-digit) pin. They can usually guess the account name; worse, if they have access to your phone, they can probably scrape the account name out of memory. This leaves four digits as the sum total of your security.
This is why large transactions should always be verified with a call to your home phone, and funds should not be transferred until someone gets home and calls the number to verify it, providing the passcode that they leave on your answering machine. And even then, it's probably not all that secure if there is any way to get your home phone number from any card stripe in your billfold.
This is also why credit card companies put the onus of identity verification on the merchant. Unfortunately, for online transactions, fraud is inevitable, which is why some merchants will only ship to the billing address, require a phone call to the billing phone number prior to shipping, etc.
Security is hard. Real security is harder.
Most online stores these days offer free shipping, and many (Amazon, for example) will even eat the shipping cost for returns. And yet they still come out cheaper than local stores in many cases. So I don't think #4 really applies as often as it used to.
#3 doesn't always apply, either. Many people go to the local store to see the product, then order it online when they see how much more expensive it is locally. In effect, #3 only applies when #2 also applies, making #3 irrelevant.
I would say that #1 is the most important thing in a local store—having a wide enough selection to meet the customer's needs most of the time. Fry's = good. Best Buy = screwed.
That's a minor part of their business these days. AFAIK, a big chunk of their income comes from the money they get from the cellular companies every time they convince someone to sign up for phone service.
Of course, if you're the only source for a product in town, even low sales volume can be sustainable if you charge a high enough markup.
That explains it. Different area. That certainly hasn't been my experience with the South Bay stores.
Between Fry's and Radio Shack, I've generally been able to find most of the components I need for most hobby projects. They have a pretty good selection of resistors, capacitors, etc. as long as they have them in stock. Unfortunately, it often takes two or three stores to find them in sufficient quantity. Hint: for components, always go to Campbell. Never go to Sunnyvale. YMMV with San Jose.
I've never seen this, and I return defective products to Fry's at least three or four times per year. If you tell them the item is defective, they put a sticker on it, but the sticker says "Return to vendor". They only stick the rebate sticker on it if you tell them you changed your mind about it. So either you weren't clear enough when you told them that it was defective, or you went to a Fry's store that is poorly run compared with my local store.
I'm dubious about returns because I worry about parts being missing, and I'm dubious about returned hard drives because I wonder if the previous customer dropped them, but for most things, the sticker of doom doesn't bother me too much. Usually it just means that I saved a couple of bucks.
That said, it may depend on the store. Which Fry's store was this?
I agree with you except for #2 and #3. Those are the exact opposite of what they should do. The biggest thing that drives me to buy stuff online is lack of selection at local stores.
When it comes to buying expensive electronics, I spend the time to research and figure out what I want ahead of time, and then I look online to see what local stores have the product I chose. If none of them do, I order online.
When it comes to cheaper stuff (under $50), I usually go to Fry's, in part because their prices tend to be better than most other stores, but largely because they have a much broader selection than any other store, and it pisses me off to have to go to two or three stores just to find a $5 cable. If they don't have something that meets my needs, my next stop is usually Amazon, because if Fry's doesn't have it, odds are good that nobody else will have it locally.
The problem is, when I have to order online, it is usually because they didn't have one small part of a much larger order. If I have to wait a week to get some of the parts for a project, I might as well wait for all of them. This means that whenever Fry's does not have one item, they typically lose the sale of five or six more, on average. Thus, having a broad selection is the only thing preventing them from being completely overtaken by Amazon and other online retailers.
To put it in perspective, the smallest Fry's store I've ever been in was at least three times the size of the largest Best Buy store I've ever been in. This is why they are a decent place to buy electronics and Best Buy sucks. You cannot have adequate selection of electronics in a store the size of Best Buy. Making it smaller and further reducing the selection can only make it less likely that I'll find what I'm looking for, and thus more likely that I'll eventually stop bothering to try that store at all (and, frankly, BB is already too small for me to bother with it).
With consistently higher prices and terrible customer service policies, I can't imagine how Best Buy has stayed in business as long as they have. There's a reason I've always called them "Worst Buy". They usually are.
To give you an idea of their customer service, I priced a product online with Google, and it told me that Best Buy had it for a great price. I went there, and found that they had just raised their price by nearly a hundred bucks. I knew this because they had a recently returned unit available for less than their previous price. I bought the returned unit.
Unfortunately, it was defective (flaky HDMI output). At most stores, when a product is DOA, you can go in and they'll swap it out with a working one. Not at Best Buy. Because they didn't have any more customer-returned products from when the price was lower, my only option (at their store) was to pay an extra $120 to get a working product.
I pointed out that their new, higher price was about thirty or forty dollars higher than Fry's, just two blocks away, and over a hundred dollars higher than Amazon. Needless to say, I opted for a refund.
I then drove to Fry's. They matched Amazon's price, so I ended up getting it for almost exactly what Best Buy had been charging two weeks earlier.
Why anyone ever darkens the door of Best Buy is beyond me. I could see buying stuff like DVDs from Best Buy online (where you can price compare easily), but just walking into the store, your odds of getting even an acceptable deal are right up there with winning the lottery.
Tell that to the college students who can barely afford their tuition. Even the student editions of Photoshop, at $199, is solidly a factor of ten more than is realistic for most students. That approaches the cost of the textbooks for an entire quarter or semester, and that's before you factor in the fact that they get some of that money back when they sell the books back.
The bigger problem is that the piracy that was actually excusable when they were in school becomes the normal way that they obtain software going forward. There is exactly one solution that will fix that, which is to charge only low double-digit dollars for your app, at least to students, so that most of them will buy legitimate copies instead of pirating them. When those students graduate, if they still need the app, they will be used to paying for it, and will be more likely to buy it (at upgrade pricing). This approach requires practically giving away the software, though, which is why most businesses are too scared to attempt it.
I take it you know a lot of people who would steal a car, a television, or a DVD.... Assuming they could get away with it, I mean....
People like that are going to steal or pirate no matter what the manufacturers/distributors do, and if they can't steal or pirate one thing, they'll steal or pirate something else. They still won't pay for any of it as long as there are free alternatives. There will always be free alternatives. Therefore, that portion of the pirate market is not only unavoidable, but also utterly irrelevant to any discussion of piracy.
I suppose it depends on the product, but....
In general, it looks to me like there is a strong correlation between price and piracy rate. Now you might argue that both the high price and the high piracy rate are caused by high utility, but both of those products are relatively niche products used by a small percentage of computer users. How can they have dramatically higher utility than, for example, Microsoft Office? Clearly, this is not the case. Yet Office gets pirated much, much less than Photoshop. Why? Most likely because it costs a lot less.
More to the point, this wasn't always the case. A decade ago, Office was one of the most highly pirated apps out there. Then Microsoft started making it available at a lower cost. For example, in China (where piracy was rampant), they lowered the retail price to $29. Now, they have a much lower rate of piracy. I'd say their experience pretty solidly refutes your assertion that lowering prices doesn't reduce piracy.
Now I'm not saying that lowering prices will always reduce piracy. I'm sure you can find some situations where lowering the price does not decrease piracy rates—the app's utility might be relatively low (and thus worth almost nothing to its users), the app might be a buggy piece of garbage that nobody is willing to pay for, or there might be artificial impediments to its legal purchase (e.g. sold exclusively with expensive hardware, sold only to people in a particular field, sold only as part of a larger collection/album/set, etc.). And there is certainly a point of diminishing returns beyond which lowering the price won't reduce piracy further. Most software, movies, and music are nowhere near that point, though, as far as I can tell.
That's completely wrong in the modern era. It might have been true when content was pirated by swapping disks around at a user group meeting. With P2P piracy, content remains available as long as there is at least one complete copy among all of the people who are trying to download it and/or are still seeding it after finishing their download. Thus, the number of original copies is meaningless; it only takes one purchaser to make the content available to everyone. After that, for the most part, none of the people making unauthorized copies are people who purchased a copy.
Therefore, to the extent that lowering the price increases piracy rates, it is not because it is easier to find a pirated copy, but rather it is an externality caused by more purchasers recommending it to more people, a greater number of whom are people who would not have even considered the work otherwise. Thus, when lowering prices increases piracy, it solidly supports my assertion that few of the people who pirate books, movies, or music would have bought the work, making all the industry's whining and kvetching utterly without merit.
Obligation, no. But if it became safer to steal cable overnight, and if more people then stole it, I think you'd find that most of the people stealing it were those who currently use an over-the-air antenna. In other words, the market would be almost exactly the same as it is today as far as the cable company is concerned. As such, they would not suddenly earn the right to whine about all those evil cable thieves taking away their business.
More to the point, if they then decided that they wanted to turn those new cable thieves (who previously used an antenna) into paying customers rather than merely turning them back into over-the-air antenna users, their only viable option for doing so would be to lower prices. No amount of cracking down on them will improve their bottom line so long as free or significantly cheaper alternatives exist (even if those alternatives are inferior).
No, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if the vast majority of people are stealing your service rather than paying for it, it is safe to assume that your price is too high. The fact that only a handful of people steal cable is evidence that their price is roughly reasonable.
I'm also saying that your comparison is flawed because it does not take into account differences between the two markets. In cable, very few people steal it because they are so easily caught. The cable companies are thus forced to compete in a purely capitalistic universe in which the number of people who get their product is dependent on how well they price it. By contrast, the number of people who watch a movie is not dependent upon price. At all. Even if you only consider the number of people who buy a movie and loan it out to their friends (which is legal, unlike loaning out your cable service). Only the number of people who pay for the movie is dependent on price, not the number of people who consume it.
This fundamental difference between the inherent nature of selling a service (cable TV) and selling a product (a movie) makes your analogy completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.