There are a couple of variants to this gene, one of which causes this instructive behavior to occur while in motion. The condition is known medically as BSDS... Back Seat Driver Syndrome.
Well, I don't mind it if, as I've seen some stores do, they label opens/returns as such and then offer a discount. I mean, heck, if somebody returns a nice swivel chair because it didn't match the decor of their home office, I'll happily buy it for a substantial discount.
Of course, how much do you want to bet that these outfits are selling the returns at full price, and still taking the manufacturer's allowance for the "defective" product?
That's an easy one. It's called a shrink wrap machine. All the big stores have one. They just take the product you returned, shrinkwrap it and put some official-looking stickers on the outside so it looks factory fresh... and throw it back on the shelf for the next sucker that comes along. Best Buy did that to me several times, so now I don't go to Best Buy. I'd rather order online and wait a few days than give those bloodsuckers another penny of my money. The last time I went there I bought a cordless phone system with three handsets: when I got it home and cracked the shrinkwrap and opened it up, I found that the handsets were all scuffed up like they'd been through a war, only one of them worked and it rattled when I shook it. Took it back and got a hard time. After talking to the store manager, they finally took it back, and I have no doubt it was out for sale again within the hour. I had similar experiences at CompUSA, and stopped going there some years ago as well. So far as I'm concerned, the big retailers have no cause for complaint when their sales drop: they've cut the quality of their operations to the point where you're safer buying online.
Anyone remember Tandy's ill-fated "Computer City" stores? Same problems there, and guess what, they also are out of business. Hell, I spent fifty bucks (fifty bucks!) on a nice joystick, back in the days when I was playing Descent II a lot. Got it home, opened the box... and found another destroyed device. Scuffed, scratched, case cracked, springs broken and yes, it rattled. I was back at Computer City's service desk within fifteen minutes, and was told that they couldn't take it back, because it was in "unsaleable condition". "Why is that a problem" I asked "I mean, you just sold it to me in that condition not half an hour ago." Guy refused to take it back. After a few more minutes of this, I'm starting to get upset, other customers are starting to take notice, an the store manager comes over. "What's the problem here?" I told him "I want to return this piece of junk I just bought." He also refused, and he said, "You must have done that to it." I said (rather loudly) "I JUST BOUGHT THE THING HALF AN HOUR AGO!" to which he replied, "Well, sometimes they come from the factory like that." Well, at that point I get very angry and all the checkout lanes have come to a halt as people are watching this byplay. This idiot looked around and saw that people were putting their purchases down and heading for the doors, and decided to give me my refund. Wanted to make it a store credit, and I said, "No way, I'm not coming back." So I got my cash, but I really had to work for it.
And they wonder why nobody wants to shop brick-and-mortar anymore. It's not just that online ordering is somehow magically "better", sometimes it is nice to walk around an actual store, but these guys don't seem to be working very hard to make it worthwhile.
Well, if they do push it through, I suspect the net effect will be much the same as it was here in the U.S. when the DMCA was signed into law: copyright infringement will continue as before on the same massive scale, only now they'll have pissed off all the people that understand the issues and have the knowledge and power to commit infringement on an even greater scale. Watch the networks begin to swell with music and movies upon news that this law has been passed. I swear, every time I hear about something like this I feel like posting a couple of torrents to The Pirate Bay or Mininova... you know, just to spit in their eye.
Basically, it's just stupid, it won't advance their cause as much as they think it will, and they'll alienate even more people. I just can't believe the degree of assholiness these people exhibit, and I don't care what country they're in. It's really unbelievable.
why the hell are attachments allowed to be delivered via email at all? It makes it just too easy to get infected. For example, on my own system incoming attachments are removed and placed into a user folder on a network drive. The email itself has an addendum that tells the user that the attachment cannot be accessed from within the email client, and provides the location of the file on the network (no hyperlink, nothing to click on.) That simple action makes it impossible for a user to stupidly click on an attachment (he has to want to go get it) and eliminates any possibility of the email client autoexecuting it. Yes, stupid people will still go out to the network folder and click on "Britney Spears Breasts.jpg.pif.zip.exe", but they have to make an effort. It helps.
I agree, but you know, if I truly believed Congress was simply uninformed on these important issues, but still had the best of intentions (road to Hell being paved with them notwithstanding) I might be more understanding. Fact is, these bastards (and bitch) know exactly what they're doing, know perfectly well that they're wronger than wrong... but are going ahead with it anyway! That's when they cross the line from being clueless to actually evil.
This law is being bought and paid for by big media, like so many other "IP friendly" laws already on the books, meaning that once again we've been sold out by our elected leaders. There are countries where such corporate influence (read: corruption) is illegal, and is considered the treason that it is. It's high time time we start thinking of lobbying and (ahem!) "campaign contributions" in exactly the same way. Feel like peddling your influence to pass a law that goes directly against the best interests of the American people? Hope you can do the time. That's how it should be.
This is just sickening. I have the feeling we're not that far from Joe Public taking serious notice of this, because if the Feds start breaking down doors looking for bootleg videos there's gonna be Hell to pay. The media outfits are just drunk with power... they got their copyright extensions, they got the DMCA... now they want the Feds to start cracking heads on their behalf? They are going to push this too far, because they don't seem able to stop, able to accept any limits on what they should be allowed to do. They should be happy with what they have: this is going to explode and the backlash is not going to be pretty. The Federal Government is really pushing a lot of the American people's buttons lately. Something is going to have to give.
Which doesn't necessarily mean anything. Holes can be punched in firewalls. Skype is particularly good at that, for example. I suspect we'll see plenty of VoIP calls being made from aircraft, assuming that latency isn't excessive.
No, it just happens to be in our Constitution. Many of us feel that document is important. Many others feel that it's important as well, because it provides a model for good governance that hasn't been bettered to this day. The reality is this: most of America's problems in recent times have come because our various Governments (Federal, State and local) no longer follow the Supreme Law of our Land as closely as they once did. The fact that our government even wants to disarm us is a good indication of how far we've diverged from a Constitutional government.
You also have no concept of what the Right to Bear Arms means, why it is in the Constitution, and that violent overthrow of the government is not its primary function, although it is an important one. The reason the Founders wanted us armed is was to deter the government from ever going too far, to make that government be eternally afraid of We the People. Unfortunately, our government very much wants to go too far, which is why there's such pressure to disarm the population. If we allow that to happen, whatever treatment we get we'll deserve it for giving up that right.
If you want to register a complaint about the United States and its people, calling our Constitution "hot air" is not the way to make points, because there are plenty of legitimate issues to discuss. More to the point, the Right to Bear Arms is hardly something that Americans need to "feel good" about themselves, in fact, there are millions of foolish people here who call that Right "barbaric" and wish we didn't have it. More the fools they.
Besides, there are one hell of a lot of people on this planet that could benefit if their lawmakers took a page out of our Founders' book, a lot of people that wish they had a Constitutional Right to Bear Arms. But they don't, and they can't change their government even if they wanted to, because their governments have all the guns and will cheerfully shoot them.
The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected... and I think that's a great opportunity.
What? First of all, ISPs are not a "community", they're a bunch of cutthroats that would cheerfully sell each other out for a song, and frequently do. Secondly, he (as usual) gets it exactly backwards. ISPs have nothing to gain and everything to lose, pissing of their entire customer base by filtering and making the Internet less useful to people. Their core business is shipping packets from point A to point B, not telling people what packets they can't ship at all. So, what exactly is the MPAA going to offer ISPs to make up for all the business they're going to lose if they starting doing the Copyright Cop thing?
With respect, Sir or Madam... you just provided a classic example of knee-jerk ignorance.
I urge you to lurk on some of the threads involving these issues and educate yourself more thoroughly as to what the stakes really are, or if you would like to get up to speed more quickly, visit Ray Beckerman's blog (he regularly posts relevant material on Slashdot and is known as NewYorkCountryLawyer hereabouts. He's an attorney who defends people from these lawsuits, and has kindly provided a wealth of information on the situation and its legal ramifications. I strongly suggest you read it before you post on this topic again.
So they are punishing her for the "further infringements" others MAY have done after the got the songs from her computer as well ?? This doesnt make any sense @ all to me..
That's because you're a. obviously not a lawyer and b. don't work for the RIAA. I'm not a lawyer either, and even if I were I'd never work for those bloodsuckers.
Why should they have a right to retaliate? Only the justice system has that right, and only after due process. Worse, in the case of a (probably corrupt) city council, that retaliation might take decidely not-so-legal form. People have been known to disappear when pissing off the wrong politicians.
On the other hand, the MPAA should have had all it's ducks lined up in a row. They're big boys, they can afford to do things right. The fact that they didn't bother is another indication of their above-the-law attitude. They really just don't care. I'll bet they're caring now, and I'll bet there are some heads rolling in the legal department right now.
The delicious irony here is that the MPAA drafted the DMCA and were primarily responsible for pushing it through Congress.
I think Guilder's Rule applies here. The thing is, this is a commodity function. People just want a convenient and ubiquitous format for storing music. I have a hard time imaging a compression scheme that would be an order of magnitude "better" (and that's a relative term) than MP3. About the only quantity that would really matter for most people is file size, and I have an even harder time imagining a format that would squeeze a song from four or five megabytes down to 512K.
Unfortunately this is possible only if a large number of citizens become engaged and struggle for change. Will they?
Yes, but when it happens it won't be us becoming engaged, but enraged. Not enough of us really grasp the magnitude of the treason it took for us to reach this point. But we will.
Right now, not enough of us have been hurt or otherwise affected by the current government's anti-liberty stance and economic/scientific policies from Hell. Oh sure, we're paying three bucks a gallon for gas, but hey, we can live with that, right? Wrong. That's a symptom of severe underlying problems, not a transient artifact. We're going to be shaken out of our complacency, probably sooner rather than later, because the sheer effect of the past sixteen years worth of defective Presidency's defective economic policies is going to hit, and hit hard. Well, it's been a downhill slide for longer than that, but the tag-team of Clinton and then Bush has been an unmitigated disaster. We've been sold out, pure and simple, by our elected and unelected government officials, and the Captains of Industry who decided, in their endless quest for maximum profit, that their fellow citizens really weren't worth all that much.
I know someone who's a consultant for top-level executives of some very large U.S. corporations... and you know what she says? They're already planning for the collapse of the U.S. economy. These guys are diversifying their interests internationally as much as possible, so that when the big crash comes they won't be affected much by it. All the American people that work for them, or used to work for them, are of no particular concern. Of course, it seems that the fact they're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy is entirely lost on them. Or perhaps, given that many such organizations have deliberately hired non-American CEOs (figuring that there won't be any vestigial concern for their domestic workers) maybe they are trying to fulfill that prophecy themselves. Either way, there's something seriously wrong at the top.
It's sickening, because it didn't have to happen. Our neighbor to the south is a corrupt, failed culture... sadly, America is not very far behind.
I'm sure that terrorists who want to destroy america will go out of their way to obey laws.
Are you kidding? Those guys will keep a low profile and obey every immigration rule, speed limit and traffic sign... right up until they trip the detonator.
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There are a couple of variants to this gene, one of which causes this instructive behavior to occur while in motion. The condition is known medically as BSDS ... Back Seat Driver Syndrome.
Well, I don't mind it if, as I've seen some stores do, they label opens/returns as such and then offer a discount. I mean, heck, if somebody returns a nice swivel chair because it didn't match the decor of their home office, I'll happily buy it for a substantial discount.
Of course, how much do you want to bet that these outfits are selling the returns at full price, and still taking the manufacturer's allowance for the "defective" product?
I've been trying to train myself to excrete nanotubes, but so far all I've gotten are macrorods.
How can they re stock a defective product?
... and throw it back on the shelf for the next sucker that comes along. Best Buy did that to me several times, so now I don't go to Best Buy. I'd rather order online and wait a few days than give those bloodsuckers another penny of my money. The last time I went there I bought a cordless phone system with three handsets: when I got it home and cracked the shrinkwrap and opened it up, I found that the handsets were all scuffed up like they'd been through a war, only one of them worked and it rattled when I shook it. Took it back and got a hard time. After talking to the store manager, they finally took it back, and I have no doubt it was out for sale again within the hour. I had similar experiences at CompUSA, and stopped going there some years ago as well. So far as I'm concerned, the big retailers have no cause for complaint when their sales drop: they've cut the quality of their operations to the point where you're safer buying online.
... and found another destroyed device. Scuffed, scratched, case cracked, springs broken and yes, it rattled. I was back at Computer City's service desk within fifteen minutes, and was told that they couldn't take it back, because it was in "unsaleable condition". "Why is that a problem" I asked "I mean, you just sold it to me in that condition not half an hour ago." Guy refused to take it back. After a few more minutes of this, I'm starting to get upset, other customers are starting to take notice, an the store manager comes over. "What's the problem here?" I told him "I want to return this piece of junk I just bought." He also refused, and he said, "You must have done that to it." I said (rather loudly) "I JUST BOUGHT THE THING HALF AN HOUR AGO!" to which he replied, "Well, sometimes they come from the factory like that." Well, at that point I get very angry and all the checkout lanes have come to a halt as people are watching this byplay. This idiot looked around and saw that people were putting their purchases down and heading for the doors, and decided to give me my refund. Wanted to make it a store credit, and I said, "No way, I'm not coming back." So I got my cash, but I really had to work for it.
That's an easy one. It's called a shrink wrap machine. All the big stores have one. They just take the product you returned, shrinkwrap it and put some official-looking stickers on the outside so it looks factory fresh
Anyone remember Tandy's ill-fated "Computer City" stores? Same problems there, and guess what, they also are out of business. Hell, I spent fifty bucks (fifty bucks!) on a nice joystick, back in the days when I was playing Descent II a lot. Got it home, opened the box
And they wonder why nobody wants to shop brick-and-mortar anymore. It's not just that online ordering is somehow magically "better", sometimes it is nice to walk around an actual store, but these guys don't seem to be working very hard to make it worthwhile.
Well, if they do push it through, I suspect the net effect will be much the same as it was here in the U.S. when the DMCA was signed into law: copyright infringement will continue as before on the same massive scale, only now they'll have pissed off all the people that understand the issues and have the knowledge and power to commit infringement on an even greater scale. Watch the networks begin to swell with music and movies upon news that this law has been passed. I swear, every time I hear about something like this I feel like posting a couple of torrents to The Pirate Bay or Mininova ... you know, just to spit in their eye.
Basically, it's just stupid, it won't advance their cause as much as they think it will, and they'll alienate even more people. I just can't believe the degree of assholiness these people exhibit, and I don't care what country they're in. It's really unbelievable.
why the hell are attachments allowed to be delivered via email at all? It makes it just too easy to get infected. For example, on my own system incoming attachments are removed and placed into a user folder on a network drive. The email itself has an addendum that tells the user that the attachment cannot be accessed from within the email client, and provides the location of the file on the network (no hyperlink, nothing to click on.) That simple action makes it impossible for a user to stupidly click on an attachment (he has to want to go get it) and eliminates any possibility of the email client autoexecuting it. Yes, stupid people will still go out to the network folder and click on "Britney Spears Breasts.jpg.pif.zip.exe", but they have to make an effort. It helps.
I agree, but you know, if I truly believed Congress was simply uninformed on these important issues, but still had the best of intentions (road to Hell being paved with them notwithstanding) I might be more understanding. Fact is, these bastards (and bitch) know exactly what they're doing, know perfectly well that they're wronger than wrong ... but are going ahead with it anyway! That's when they cross the line from being clueless to actually evil.
... they got their copyright extensions, they got the DMCA ... now they want the Feds to start cracking heads on their behalf? They are going to push this too far, because they don't seem able to stop, able to accept any limits on what they should be allowed to do. They should be happy with what they have: this is going to explode and the backlash is not going to be pretty. The Federal Government is really pushing a lot of the American people's buttons lately. Something is going to have to give.
This law is being bought and paid for by big media, like so many other "IP friendly" laws already on the books, meaning that once again we've been sold out by our elected leaders. There are countries where such corporate influence (read: corruption) is illegal, and is considered the treason that it is. It's high time time we start thinking of lobbying and (ahem!) "campaign contributions" in exactly the same way. Feel like peddling your influence to pass a law that goes directly against the best interests of the American people? Hope you can do the time. That's how it should be.
This is just sickening. I have the feeling we're not that far from Joe Public taking serious notice of this, because if the Feds start breaking down doors looking for bootleg videos there's gonna be Hell to pay. The media outfits are just drunk with power
Which doesn't necessarily mean anything. Holes can be punched in firewalls. Skype is particularly good at that, for example. I suspect we'll see plenty of VoIP calls being made from aircraft, assuming that latency isn't excessive.
No, it just happens to be in our Constitution. Many of us feel that document is important. Many others feel that it's important as well, because it provides a model for good governance that hasn't been bettered to this day. The reality is this: most of America's problems in recent times have come because our various Governments (Federal, State and local) no longer follow the Supreme Law of our Land as closely as they once did. The fact that our government even wants to disarm us is a good indication of how far we've diverged from a Constitutional government.
You also have no concept of what the Right to Bear Arms means, why it is in the Constitution, and that violent overthrow of the government is not its primary function, although it is an important one. The reason the Founders wanted us armed is was to deter the government from ever going too far, to make that government be eternally afraid of We the People. Unfortunately, our government very much wants to go too far, which is why there's such pressure to disarm the population. If we allow that to happen, whatever treatment we get we'll deserve it for giving up that right.
If you want to register a complaint about the United States and its people, calling our Constitution "hot air" is not the way to make points, because there are plenty of legitimate issues to discuss. More to the point, the Right to Bear Arms is hardly something that Americans need to "feel good" about themselves, in fact, there are millions of foolish people here who call that Right "barbaric" and wish we didn't have it. More the fools they.
Besides, there are one hell of a lot of people on this planet that could benefit if their lawmakers took a page out of our Founders' book, a lot of people that wish they had a Constitutional Right to Bear Arms. But they don't, and they can't change their government even if they wanted to, because their governments have all the guns and will cheerfully shoot them.
The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected ... and I think that's a great opportunity.
What? First of all, ISPs are not a "community", they're a bunch of cutthroats that would cheerfully sell each other out for a song, and frequently do. Secondly, he (as usual) gets it exactly backwards. ISPs have nothing to gain and everything to lose, pissing of their entire customer base by filtering and making the Internet less useful to people. Their core business is shipping packets from point A to point B, not telling people what packets they can't ship at all. So, what exactly is the MPAA going to offer ISPs to make up for all the business they're going to lose if they starting doing the Copyright Cop thing?
Arrogant twit.
With respect, Sir or Madam ... you just provided a classic example of knee-jerk ignorance.
I urge you to lurk on some of the threads involving these issues and educate yourself more thoroughly as to what the stakes really are, or if you would like to get up to speed more quickly, visit Ray Beckerman's blog (he regularly posts relevant material on Slashdot and is known as NewYorkCountryLawyer hereabouts. He's an attorney who defends people from these lawsuits, and has kindly provided a wealth of information on the situation and its legal ramifications. I strongly suggest you read it before you post on this topic again.
The DoJ cost way too much money to tax payers, it's time to outsource it to a region where stupidity costs much less.
Pick a country.
So they are punishing her for the "further infringements" others MAY have done after the got the songs from her computer as well ?? This doesnt make any sense @ all to me ..
That's because you're a. obviously not a lawyer and b. don't work for the RIAA. I'm not a lawyer either, and even if I were I'd never work for those bloodsuckers.
Why should they have a right to retaliate? Only the justice system has that right, and only after due process. Worse, in the case of a (probably corrupt) city council, that retaliation might take decidely not-so-legal form. People have been known to disappear when pissing off the wrong politicians.
because no one would interpret that literally to mean that George Bush is actually a sphincter.
They wouldn't?
On the other hand, the MPAA should have had all it's ducks lined up in a row. They're big boys, they can afford to do things right. The fact that they didn't bother is another indication of their above-the-law attitude. They really just don't care. I'll bet they're caring now, and I'll bet there are some heads rolling in the legal department right now.
The delicious irony here is that the MPAA drafted the DMCA and were primarily responsible for pushing it through Congress.
Classic. Absolutely classic.
.... as I actually find myself cheering for the evil WalMart empire who doesn't seem so evil at the moment.
... you'll get over it. So will Wal-Mart.
My mind is going. I can feel it.
Don't worry, Hal
Sometimes I wonder if Slashdot just autogenerates these things all by itself.
I think Guilder's Rule applies here. The thing is, this is a commodity function. People just want a convenient and ubiquitous format for storing music. I have a hard time imaging a compression scheme that would be an order of magnitude "better" (and that's a relative term) than MP3. About the only quantity that would really matter for most people is file size, and I have an even harder time imagining a format that would squeeze a song from four or five megabytes down to 512K.
I was surprised that the crowd didn't rip Martin to pieces.
Maybe if citizens were allowed to rip misguided public officials to pieces when they err, there'd be a lot less erring on the part of said officials.
Unfortunately this is possible only if a large number of citizens become engaged and struggle for change. Will they?
... and you know what she says? They're already planning for the collapse of the U.S. economy. These guys are diversifying their interests internationally as much as possible, so that when the big crash comes they won't be affected much by it. All the American people that work for them, or used to work for them, are of no particular concern. Of course, it seems that the fact they're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy is entirely lost on them. Or perhaps, given that many such organizations have deliberately hired non-American CEOs (figuring that there won't be any vestigial concern for their domestic workers) maybe they are trying to fulfill that prophecy themselves. Either way, there's something seriously wrong at the top.
... sadly, America is not very far behind.
Yes, but when it happens it won't be us becoming engaged, but enraged. Not enough of us really grasp the magnitude of the treason it took for us to reach this point. But we will.
Right now, not enough of us have been hurt or otherwise affected by the current government's anti-liberty stance and economic/scientific policies from Hell. Oh sure, we're paying three bucks a gallon for gas, but hey, we can live with that, right? Wrong. That's a symptom of severe underlying problems, not a transient artifact. We're going to be shaken out of our complacency, probably sooner rather than later, because the sheer effect of the past sixteen years worth of defective Presidency's defective economic policies is going to hit, and hit hard. Well, it's been a downhill slide for longer than that, but the tag-team of Clinton and then Bush has been an unmitigated disaster. We've been sold out, pure and simple, by our elected and unelected government officials, and the Captains of Industry who decided, in their endless quest for maximum profit, that their fellow citizens really weren't worth all that much.
I know someone who's a consultant for top-level executives of some very large U.S. corporations
It's sickening, because it didn't have to happen. Our neighbor to the south is a corrupt, failed culture
No, as in "Areolus", the Greek God of the Savage Breast.
Yes, but the GP was complaining about "nutters killing people", not the fact that security has made tourism unpleasant.
I'm sure that terrorists who want to destroy america will go out of their way to obey laws.
... right up until they trip the detonator.
Are you kidding? Those guys will keep a low profile and obey every immigration rule, speed limit and traffic sign