My main frustration with the outsourcing "issue" isn't that I'm talking to someone from India. It's that I'm talking to someone from India that's pretending to be from America. It's really insulting to our intelligence and I'm not sure what they gain from it at this point. Now it's well known that there's a ton of outsourcing, so why do companies bother trying to hide it anymore?
Firmware updates will be available online (don't worry, there are other ways to update), and you will be able to make one copy onto an HDCP-compliant network video device.
HD-DVD is coming out because standard DVDs do not support HD resolution. It will probably be a long time until HD is upgraded, and as such will probably be a long time before a new format would be needed.
With that said, the DRM actually IS better overall on HD-DVDs that standard DVDs, mostly because the content restrictions will be encoded on the disc rather than the player, so HD-DVD producers have control over how their content can be played. This might sound bad at first, but the alternative realistically is that the players would have been locked down to the most-restrictive setting. Now the discs have to force it down to that setting.
As mentioned in other replies, the articles in question were removed and rewritten so they are valid articles, but they're different than they used to be.
Except you can't really leech on BitTorrent. Even if you block outgoing traffic on it or something, you will still probably show up on the list of users that they are harvesting to send out these letters...
As usual when people talk about these issues, the interviewer missed the boat and focused only on issues that affect a miniscule fraction of people (building your own HDTV? come on...)
What we need to strive to do is to find real issues that affect the masses. Or at least more than 1% of people. The Linux issue is a good one for now, but it doesn't really get to the root of the problem, because once they put out a single licensed DVD player for Linux, your argument vanishes.
If I had the opportunity to "grill" Valenti (which I probably won't) I'd ask him questions that I had to deal with myself, and I figure many others would as well. Like why I can't watch the Region 2 DVD I bought in Germany. Or why I have to buy a modulator box (or a new TV!) to hook up my DVD player through a VCR to a TV with no video inputs. At least such a device exists, but still...it's frustrating to have to add another box to my ever-growing pile just to get around Macrovision.
Another legitimate question would have been what people who currently have HDTVs or digital video cards are supposed to do once the broadcast flag rolls out. Oh well, maybe this will come up someday.
The CORRECT response should have been "Why does that matter? Do I not have the right to build stuff for myself?"
You're right, though Valenti did eventually answer the question, a few lines down. He basically said "If there's a thousand (then he even upped that to 100,000) people who have legitimate reasons to circumvent this technology, screw 'em...we can't open the door to the other millions." So I guess there's the answer we've been looking for, or at least I have anyway. They're simply not interested in full compatibility and functionality for everyone. They're content making things work for the 98% (or whatever the number is) of people who just want to rent/buy DVDs and pop it in their DVD player at home and watch it. Screw the other 2%. Obviously I don't like this approach, but I don't recall them actually coming out and saying it before.
Properly configured mail servers accept mail from people who are connected to their network, and from nobody else. Thus you should be able to send email from your @foo.com email thru mail.lameisp.net but NOT though mail.foo.com (your foo.com mailserver should block that connection). This happened at my college awhile back. Their mail server used to accept connections to send my email even when I wasn't on-campus. Then AOL blocked us, and told us we had an open relay, and when they fixed it, lo and behold, I couldn't send mail through the mailserver from offcampus anymore. I had to send it through the mailserver of my ISP, which is how it's supposed to work.
The difference between your analogies and downloading music is that the people in your analogies actually LOST something. In the first case, the mechanic lost some of his valuable time, and in the second example the city lost some money (according to your example, $20). People that say theft only involves physical property are over-generalizing, but MOST theft does involve physical property.
Downloading music involves no direct loss for the RIAA. Nobody's time is lost and they don't have to pay out any money. The only way they can claim a loss is if they assume you would have bought the album that you downloaded, which is tenuous at best.
I'd say that's misleading at best. The reason there have been more worms/virii/etc. that attack 2000/XP than 9x is purely numbers. There's so many more computers running than 2000/XP than 9x, why bother writing any kind of worm that targets 9x?
Coincidently, this is also one of the key reasons that there are more worms/virii released that target Windows than Mac or Linux - why target Mac or Linux when you can target Windows, with many, many times more users?
Hmm, your store isn't as nice as ours. I work there, and we have copies of the book lists sitting out in binders so students can check to make sure they have everything they need. Of course, many people just use the lists to write down the books they need and then go order online, but what do I care, I just work there!
I worked at the bookstore too, and ours was about the same as yours, except that we don't have bookstore employees working the buyback window. The people there are actually from the used book company (Follett in your case, Nebraska Book in ours).
We also tried to get the book lists from the profs before buyback, but there are some profs who wrote their own books who "forgot" to turn in their order before buyback. They then turned in their order after buyback with a book or two of theirs, forcing the store to buy new copies of them, which gives them their royalties!
At my school at least, it's not the bookstore that buys the books for such a low amount. The store contracts with a used book company to come in and buy the books. Some are bought to go directly to the store, and the students get 50% of the new price fot them. The rest go to the used book company for however much they are willing to pay (read: NOT MUCH).
You didn't do anything wrong. You're fully within your rights not to sell back the books if the price is too low. And if you get the lowball offers, you really shouldn't sell them. I'll correct a couple things, though. At my college store, at least, you're not "returning" the books per se. You own them and you are selling them. They make an offer and it's up to you to accept or reject their offer. Also, it probably wasn't a cashier doing it. It was probably an employee of a third-party used book company that the bookstore contacts to buy the books. Your best bet is to ask what they're paying for each individual book and only sell the ones that you get a decent amount for.
It's not the college that does the used book thing. The publishers are the ones that force you to buy new bundles by actually not selling the components in the bundles separately. One thing that could be done is require all publishers to sell everything that comes in a bundle separately, and at a fair price (not the same price as the bundle would have been). Then the professors and bookstores can actually choose if the bundle is really what they want, or just the main textbook.
A similar story was posted at another site today, and here's what I posted there, slightly edited for different context:
I have worked at the college bookstore here, and will relate how we do it. First off, our standard markup on new textbooks is 25%. Not great for the students, but also paltry compared to markup on the other stuff we sell (clothing and gifts is like 75% markup at least). However, if a book comes with the price printed on it, we price it at the printed price, even if it's at less than 25% markup. Some stores don't do this, resulting in an obvious rip-off. Of course this depends on the person who receives/tags the book checking each one for a price so it can be set appropriately. I always was very conscientious about this, but at big stores with hundreds and hundreds of books coming in a day, it would be easy to skip this step.
As for the buyback, this is probably what most people don't fully understand. As far as I know, most colleges do it similar to this. We contract book buyers from a used-book company (in our case, Nebraska Book Company, but there are others, depending on location). They come in and are the ones buying the books, not bookstore employees. The bookstore receives textbook orders from professors and puts together a list of books that the store will buy back directly from students. These books will be bought back at 50% of the new price of the book and put on the shelves. If you had bought a used book (we price used books at 75% of the new price) and sold it back for 50%, that's not great, but it's also not terrible. However, if you bring in a book that is NOT on the bookstore's list to buy, then it is the used book company that is buying it, at whatever it's worth on the wholesale market. At that point you are the lowest peg on the book totem pole and should NOT sell your books! They'll buy it for a few bucks, and then ship all of their purchases to their warehouse. They then mark it up and sell the books back to bookstores, who then mark it up again and sell to students. I'm not sure about the percentages in this, but it's not like the bookstore buys books for $5 and sells them right back for $100, at least not at my store. What is more likely is this: say you buy a book for $100 new. You go to sell it back, but the store hasn't received an order for that book yet, so the book company buys it, for maybe about $30. Then the store receives an order for the book and buys some from the used book company for about $50-55 and sells it for $75. The numbers aren't great, and again I'm not sure if they're right, but it's probably something like that.
Finally, even though I work at the store and can get a 10% discount, I've only bought a couple books there the last couple semesters. I've bought them online and saved 36% off what I would have paid, even counting the 10%, so I saved about 42% off what "normal" people would have paid.
You can't share an AOL connection over a LAN, but you can do basically everything else. Just for God's sake, DO NOT use the built-in AOL browser! That will mess you up. If you just use a separate browser (IE, Mozilla, whatever you want) everything runs as it would on a "normal" ISP.
I have an AOL address and had some problems with some messages not getting through. So I went in and turned off all spam filter settings that I could find...I figured I'd rather hit the delete key a few extra times than losing messages. I really don't get "that much" spam, but it is quite a bit. The good news is that they DO let you turn off the filters if you don't want to risk false positives.
That happened at my college a couple years ago when AOL started cracking down on open mail relays. They basically said, "You have an open relay, close it or you can't send e-mail to us" - so they closed the relay and we were let back through their filters. Basically what changed was that I could no longer use the college mail server to send my mail from home. Now you had to be on campus to use it to send mail. Which is really how it should be, since anyone around the world could have punched in the mail server name and sent any mail they wanted, hence the "open relay" I guess...
If I had to guess, something similar is happening over there. I'd recommend looking into it. It is very resolvable.
Well, he's still around for now. http://www.winamp.com/team/finger.jhtml?who=Justin: "June 21 2003 @ 12:10pm
Been back for a while now, got all the work stuff sorted out. I'm at least content now to get Winamp 5 out, we'll see how it all goes from there."
My sister is trying to port her number from Sprint to T-Mobile and she went on Dec. 1 (her old contract expired Nov. 30) and I don't think she has the new phone yet. They said to expect a 5-7 day wait. The old phone at least still works though.
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My main frustration with the outsourcing "issue" isn't that I'm talking to someone from India. It's that I'm talking to someone from India that's pretending to be from America. It's really insulting to our intelligence and I'm not sure what they gain from it at this point. Now it's well known that there's a ton of outsourcing, so why do companies bother trying to hide it anymore?
Firmware updates will be available online (don't worry, there are other ways to update), and you will be able to make one copy onto an HDCP-compliant network video device.
HD-DVD is coming out because standard DVDs do not support HD resolution. It will probably be a long time until HD is upgraded, and as such will probably be a long time before a new format would be needed.
With that said, the DRM actually IS better overall on HD-DVDs that standard DVDs, mostly because the content restrictions will be encoded on the disc rather than the player, so HD-DVD producers have control over how their content can be played. This might sound bad at first, but the alternative realistically is that the players would have been locked down to the most-restrictive setting. Now the discs have to force it down to that setting.
As mentioned in other replies, the articles in question were removed and rewritten so they are valid articles, but they're different than they used to be.
They just released a new build of 3.0 that should fix the crashing problems.
Except you can't really leech on BitTorrent. Even if you block outgoing traffic on it or something, you will still probably show up on the list of users that they are harvesting to send out these letters...
Yes they do. I got DMCA'ed for sharing only tv episodes. As always, though, if you're only downloading you have nothing to worry about.
As usual when people talk about these issues, the interviewer missed the boat and focused only on issues that affect a miniscule fraction of people (building your own HDTV? come on...)
What we need to strive to do is to find real issues that affect the masses. Or at least more than 1% of people. The Linux issue is a good one for now, but it doesn't really get to the root of the problem, because once they put out a single licensed DVD player for Linux, your argument vanishes.
If I had the opportunity to "grill" Valenti (which I probably won't) I'd ask him questions that I had to deal with myself, and I figure many others would as well. Like why I can't watch the Region 2 DVD I bought in Germany. Or why I have to buy a modulator box (or a new TV!) to hook up my DVD player through a VCR to a TV with no video inputs. At least such a device exists, but still...it's frustrating to have to add another box to my ever-growing pile just to get around Macrovision.
Another legitimate question would have been what people who currently have HDTVs or digital video cards are supposed to do once the broadcast flag rolls out. Oh well, maybe this will come up someday.
Properly configured mail servers accept mail from people who are connected to their network, and from nobody else. Thus you should be able to send email from your @foo.com email thru mail.lameisp.net but NOT though mail.foo.com (your foo.com mailserver should block that connection). This happened at my college awhile back. Their mail server used to accept connections to send my email even when I wasn't on-campus. Then AOL blocked us, and told us we had an open relay, and when they fixed it, lo and behold, I couldn't send mail through the mailserver from offcampus anymore. I had to send it through the mailserver of my ISP, which is how it's supposed to work.
The difference between your analogies and downloading music is that the people in your analogies actually LOST something. In the first case, the mechanic lost some of his valuable time, and in the second example the city lost some money (according to your example, $20). People that say theft only involves physical property are over-generalizing, but MOST theft does involve physical property.
Downloading music involves no direct loss for the RIAA. Nobody's time is lost and they don't have to pay out any money. The only way they can claim a loss is if they assume you would have bought the album that you downloaded, which is tenuous at best.
I'd say that's misleading at best. The reason there have been more worms/virii/etc. that attack 2000/XP than 9x is purely numbers. There's so many more computers running than 2000/XP than 9x, why bother writing any kind of worm that targets 9x?
Coincidently, this is also one of the key reasons that there are more worms/virii released that target Windows than Mac or Linux - why target Mac or Linux when you can target Windows, with many, many times more users?
Ah, that's different too. Ours is run by the college but we partner with Nebraska Book for the POS/ICS software and the buyback.
Nope.
Hmm, your store isn't as nice as ours. I work there, and we have copies of the book lists sitting out in binders so students can check to make sure they have everything they need. Of course, many people just use the lists to write down the books they need and then go order online, but what do I care, I just work there!
I worked at the bookstore too, and ours was about the same as yours, except that we don't have bookstore employees working the buyback window. The people there are actually from the used book company (Follett in your case, Nebraska Book in ours).
We also tried to get the book lists from the profs before buyback, but there are some profs who wrote their own books who "forgot" to turn in their order before buyback. They then turned in their order after buyback with a book or two of theirs, forcing the store to buy new copies of them, which gives them their royalties!
At my school at least, it's not the bookstore that buys the books for such a low amount. The store contracts with a used book company to come in and buy the books. Some are bought to go directly to the store, and the students get 50% of the new price fot them. The rest go to the used book company for however much they are willing to pay (read: NOT MUCH).
You didn't do anything wrong. You're fully within your rights not to sell back the books if the price is too low. And if you get the lowball offers, you really shouldn't sell them. I'll correct a couple things, though. At my college store, at least, you're not "returning" the books per se. You own them and you are selling them. They make an offer and it's up to you to accept or reject their offer. Also, it probably wasn't a cashier doing it. It was probably an employee of a third-party used book company that the bookstore contacts to buy the books. Your best bet is to ask what they're paying for each individual book and only sell the ones that you get a decent amount for.
It's not the college that does the used book thing. The publishers are the ones that force you to buy new bundles by actually not selling the components in the bundles separately. One thing that could be done is require all publishers to sell everything that comes in a bundle separately, and at a fair price (not the same price as the bundle would have been). Then the professors and bookstores can actually choose if the bundle is really what they want, or just the main textbook.
A similar story was posted at another site today, and here's what I posted there, slightly edited for different context:
I have worked at the college bookstore here, and will relate how we do it. First off, our standard markup on new textbooks is 25%. Not great for the students, but also paltry compared to markup on the other stuff we sell (clothing and gifts is like 75% markup at least). However, if a book comes with the price printed on it, we price it at the printed price, even if it's at less than 25% markup. Some stores don't do this, resulting in an obvious rip-off. Of course this depends on the person who receives/tags the book checking each one for a price so it can be set appropriately. I always was very conscientious about this, but at big stores with hundreds and hundreds of books coming in a day, it would be easy to skip this step.
As for the buyback, this is probably what most people don't fully understand. As far as I know, most colleges do it similar to this. We contract book buyers from a used-book company (in our case, Nebraska Book Company, but there are others, depending on location). They come in and are the ones buying the books, not bookstore employees. The bookstore receives textbook orders from professors and puts together a list of books that the store will buy back directly from students. These books will be bought back at 50% of the new price of the book and put on the shelves. If you had bought a used book (we price used books at 75% of the new price) and sold it back for 50%, that's not great, but it's also not terrible. However, if you bring in a book that is NOT on the bookstore's list to buy, then it is the used book company that is buying it, at whatever it's worth on the wholesale market. At that point you are the lowest peg on the book totem pole and should NOT sell your books! They'll buy it for a few bucks, and then ship all of their purchases to their warehouse. They then mark it up and sell the books back to bookstores, who then mark it up again and sell to students. I'm not sure about the percentages in this, but it's not like the bookstore buys books for $5 and sells them right back for $100, at least not at my store. What is more likely is this: say you buy a book for $100 new. You go to sell it back, but the store hasn't received an order for that book yet, so the book company buys it, for maybe about $30. Then the store receives an order for the book and buys some from the used book company for about $50-55 and sells it for $75. The numbers aren't great, and again I'm not sure if they're right, but it's probably something like that.
Finally, even though I work at the store and can get a 10% discount, I've only bought a couple books there the last couple semesters. I've bought them online and saved 36% off what I would have paid, even counting the 10%, so I saved about 42% off what "normal" people would have paid.
You can't share an AOL connection over a LAN, but you can do basically everything else. Just for God's sake, DO NOT use the built-in AOL browser! That will mess you up. If you just use a separate browser (IE, Mozilla, whatever you want) everything runs as it would on a "normal" ISP.
I have an AOL address and had some problems with some messages not getting through. So I went in and turned off all spam filter settings that I could find...I figured I'd rather hit the delete key a few extra times than losing messages. I really don't get "that much" spam, but it is quite a bit. The good news is that they DO let you turn off the filters if you don't want to risk false positives.
That happened at my college a couple years ago when AOL started cracking down on open mail relays. They basically said, "You have an open relay, close it or you can't send e-mail to us" - so they closed the relay and we were let back through their filters. Basically what changed was that I could no longer use the college mail server to send my mail from home. Now you had to be on campus to use it to send mail. Which is really how it should be, since anyone around the world could have punched in the mail server name and sent any mail they wanted, hence the "open relay" I guess...
If I had to guess, something similar is happening over there. I'd recommend looking into it. It is very resolvable.
Well, he's still around for now. http://www.winamp.com/team/finger.jhtml?who=Justin : "June 21 2003 @ 12:10pm
Been back for a while now, got all the work stuff sorted out. I'm at least content now to get Winamp 5 out, we'll see how it all goes from there."
My sister is trying to port her number from Sprint to T-Mobile and she went on Dec. 1 (her old contract expired Nov. 30) and I don't think she has the new phone yet. They said to expect a 5-7 day wait. The old phone at least still works though.