Palisade Systems offers just such an appliance. Notably, it's built on top of FOSS, easy to install in many configurations, scales very well, and easy to administer (with a kickass web-based interface). It has a swiss-army set of tools you can get with it, including URL filtering, Credit Card matching, and other sensitive data matching. Full Disclosure: I work for Palisade Systems.
I worked as a Geek Squad Agent a while ago. Seeing no real, honest replies, I figure I'll actually answer the question.
First, I agree that many Geek Squad Agents aren't too bright. However, many are. Where do you think some of the future whatever-you-are's work in high school and college? Yeah, these types of jobs.
I'm lucky that I can say at my store I was surrounded by several other smart guys, and some not so smart guys. Now, occasionally a dumb guy would try to fix something, call it fixed, and mess things up. However, that was an exception rather than the norm. Often the dumb guys would leave stuff in the back with notes on them to have someone smarter look at it:)
You have to really understand the situation these guys are in. On the one hand they've got a stream of customers who (rightly) want their computers fixed. On the other hand they've got managers who don't know anything about fixing computers, and would rather have the Geek Squad guys sell more add-on products than fix things. The managers only care about the bottom line. And only in the short-term.
So often they either have to hurry though something because they're not being "productive" (e.g. not selling enough Norton to people), or don't have the tools / replacement parts to fix things that are broken.
The way replacing parts works is this: If the best buy store sells a comparable part, and the repair is covered under warranty or service plan, then the Geek Squad Agent can pull the part off the shelf, install it, and send the customer home. This only works in a very few cases, unfortunately. Anything else has to go to a vendor for repair. The Agent just diagnoses which part is bad, boxes it up, and sends it out. Again, this isn't because the Agent is incompetant, it's because he's not allowed to fix it.
Now, all software-related problems (drivers, spyware, etc.) are done in-store. They don't ship that stuff out to vendors.
Oh, a note about fixing stuff. It's a common joke to say all that they do is just reinstall windows. In my experience, that's just not the case. However, if you really think about it, often it really is the fastest way to do something. If you're on a tight budget for time, would you rather spend a few hours or days carefully researching and repairing some asinine spyware infestation that's so embedded that no spyware cleaners will remove it, or just spend a couple hours backing up, installing windows, and restoring personal data? It just makes good sense in some cases.
In summary: Geek Squad agents, the smart ones, at least, realize the situation they're in, and try to do the best job they can despite the obstacles thrown in their way by Best Buy and their managers.
Before I'm flamed by some Geek Squad employees: I admit that my info is a bit dated. I'm sure some things are done differently now. This is my own experience.
Before I'm flamed by some Best Buy haters: I'm not saying Geek Squad is great, or it's the right thing for everybody. In fact, if you're reading/. and actually reading the comments, then Geek Squad is not a product aimed at you. Bitching about Geek Squad (and services like it) on Slashdot is like a Formula 1 pit crew lead telling an 85 year old lady to change her own oil because Jiffy Lube is a rip off. You entirely miss the point.
actually it might matter. I'm not sure exactly why, but I know diet pop uses a higher soda water to syrup ratio. Perhaps splenda-sweetened pop is in a similar boat with the weird ratios?
To answer your question, yeah the bottles were purchased at different stores. At first I swore off the stuff, but later relented.
maybe the percieved lack of carbonation was psychosomatic? the pop was carbonated; it just tasted flat.
so what you're really telling me is that I should try another one?;)
I really like Spenda, so I was enthusiastic about the Diet Coke with Splenda.
It was almost flat. There was almost no fizz in the bottle at all. Giving the benefit of the doubt, I bought another bottle of it. Maybe the first one was just bad? Nope. Second one was flat too.
I wish it were a tastier product, I'd love to buy more.
I can say with all honesty that piracy is business as usual.
Unfortunately, Geek Squad members are stuck between a rock and a hard place; the customer, who wants their stuff fixed, and Best Buy, who isn't going to shed out a single extra dollar to help out.
At the bench I worked at (laugh if you want) we actually had several bright individuals who really cared about helping customers. We often under charged for some things, and even more often, had to bring tools from home. Geek Squad Agents aren't supplied with OEM disks for anything. No windows install disk, no real software tools, no nothing.
Sure there's an official Geek Squad disk, but it's essentially useless.
Everything they use is either shareware, free software, or pirated.
I must say in my haste to post I didn't RTFA, so I don't know if the alleged (alleged? suuuuuure) pirated software was included on the official Geek Squad disk or not. However, I'm sure the problem is at least 10 times worse than anyone knows.
is the BlackBerry 8707v finally the first example of mobile device convergence everyone has been waiting for?
So I was driving out in the middle of nowhere today and noticed a new e-mail in my gmail inbox. I stopped to see what it was, a friend alerting me to a slashdot story about a brand new blackberry. Ok, I'll bite. I opened up my web browser and checked it out, and laughed to myself as I began typing a reply to my deluded friend. I was interrupted by his IM, and explained to him that the future has already arrived.
Then I decided to get back on the road. I put my PPC-6700 away and merged back into traffic.
Seriously, now. Sorry to sound like a commercial, but I love this device! There's also a windows mobile Treo, the 6700 is also available from Verizon, and several other pdaphones on the way.
By the way, I can connect the phone I have in my pocket to my laptop and get great speeds. Enough , in fact, to play World of Warcraft. With the phone in my pocket. I won't be holding by breath for this new blackberry.
Turing machines have no problem factorising large primes.
I think this is where the confusion is coming in. Yes, they can do it. But no, not quickly. The issue is how fast they can do it. So far, there is very good reason to believe the task of number factorization is in the set of NP problems; problems which cannot be computed in polynomial time, but can be verified in polynomial time (see my original post).
An interesting fact about turing machines is that any turing machine can emulate any other turing machine. What this means is that if an algorithm can be computed on a deterministic computer, it can be calulated on any other determistic computer. So the algorithm for factoring these primes on a quantum computer can be computed in polynomial time, right? That means that if the quantum computer is behaving deterministically, we can just implement the algorithm on a standard computer, and it'll finish in polynomial time too.
Yes, I agree that the actual mechanism seems deterministic because it uses a deterministic set of steps, and thank you for demonstrating how it works. The problem is, we can do that now. Doing "many calculations at once" is what massively parallel computing is. Since qubits store non-deterministic information, the machine is non-deterministic, and this is the part we can't do right now.
I believe that the actual 'computation' part of the dynamics in quantum computers is purely deterministic.
What exactly do you mean by 'computation'? If you mean "the part that does the computing", then it cannot be deterministic. If it is, then we can emulate this using a turing machine (e.g. a standard computer) and thus we'd be able to factor these large composite numbers quickly all along using our desktop computers.
I think we're just using clashing terminology here, though. I just wanted to clarify this in case anyone out there is still confused.
Can't that same concept be applied to encrypting the data as well? I mean, if it can break current encryption easily, wouldn't the logic here be that it's capable of an encryption that would take even a quantum computer decades to crack? Or am I missing something here?
In computing they divide problems into several categories. The main players to know are P, and NP. P means "solvable in polynomial time with a deterministic turing machine"; so for an input of size n, you can solve them in n^k calculations. NP are problems that are not solvable in polynomial time with a deterministic turing machine, but are verifiable in polynomial time.
It's very hard to tell which class some problems belong in, but most people agree that factoring large numbers belongs in NP. Heck, some people believe that P=NP. Who knows?
Anyhow, modern cryptography relies on factoring large numbers. As others have already stated, you can't factor large numbers in polynomial time, but you can verify an answer in polynomial time. What that means is that if I tell you "12345 is a factor of 137165295", you can do the division quickly and find out that 137165295/12345=11111, so I was right. The encryption is basically the verification part. Cracking the encryption is basically the factoring part.
Quantum computers aren't fettered by these rules because they are non-deterministic. Essentially, they speed things up by trying everything...at once. I agree it sounds magical, but apparently it works. It is at this point where my knowledge of things gets extremely fuzzy, so I won't even begin to try to explain any of this bad voodoo.
Your target sends their laptop or desktop out to a service center, such as Geek Squad. Using some social engineering you get ahold of their receipt. Call the store daily to see if "your" computer is done. As soon as it is, rush in, pay the balance, and take it home. You can steal whatever they've got stored on it.
Even worse, you might not even have to get their receipt. Call the store claiming to be the person. If they ask for a service order number or something like that, then claim you don't have your receipt with you and give them the magic phrase: "can't you just look me up?" Again, swoop in when the repair's complete, introduce yourself as Mr. Target, pay the balance, and take "your" computer home. They probably won't ask to see your receipt or service contract. If they do, then you already know what to say: "can't you just look me up?"
Sure, service centers have procedures in place to prevent this exact scenario, but people are just way too trusting.
5. A common area with with a whole bunch of different ram testers.
It may be that I'm more budget-conscious than others, but I think ram testers are a load of crap. They're expensive and quickly become obsolete as new types of ram comes out.
A better solution, IMHO, is a couple known-good barebones PCs. For any modern computer you only need one supporting SDRAM and one supporting DDR. Neither machine needs a hard drive; just a bootable CD-Rom drive with a bootable memtest86 disk.
This setup also doubles as a generic parts tester; you can plug any pci card, hard drive, cd drive, etc. into these barebones machines to verify failure. I use an ultimate boot cd in each machine. It comes with memtest , hard drive diagnostic tools, and a bunch of other diagnostic apps.
Ad implements ldap v3 anyhow, so with a few minor modifications (like schema updates) or tweaks in the source of the application, anything that works with ldap can work with active directory.
I'm a *nix guy so I'd prefer to use FOSS, but the boss says we use Active Directory. So, we do.
This guy sounds like one of Geek Squad's best customers. The guy who thinks he's a pro.
Working in the Geek Squad I find that most customers are pretty clueless; they don't know how to set up internet, or if they do, they've got a million popups. Pretty run of the mill.
The other 5% of customers I see are just like this guy. They go to best buy (cause that's where all the pros buy stuff) for some shiny new gadget for their machine, go home and spend all night shoehorning it in, and it doesn't work. Next day they show up at my bench and I've got to fix this idiot's computer and install his new hard drive. $50 well earned.
Most computer professionals can laugh in the face of geek squad all they want. Geek Squad simply isn't for people like us. In other words, if you build cars for a living, you don't go to jiffy lube, and if you build computers for a living, you don't go to geek squad. No need to be dismissive or rude about it; you're simply not the target market. Be pleased that you don't need to spend $120 every couple of months to get your machine de-spywared and move on with your life.
Geek Squad is for the unwashed masses out there. The truely clueless (or even worse, the clueless who think they're clueful). And it does just fine a job at that.
The file i/o abstraction used for everything used to make sense, since just about everything used to make sense as a file. Disks, etc. are fine. Soundcards and USB mice don't make any sense as a file.
Overreliance on this abstraction causes a lot of weird counterintuitive interactions with the machine. To set up my mouse I have to do something with/dev/foo/bar/where/did/it/go/ahh/there/it/is/mouse , and that's only if my distro has been kind enough to symlink/dev/whatever/mouse to whatever the mouse *actually* is.
or maybe I've got to echo a 1 into/proc/where/is/that/thingie instead of updating a configuration file. Or maybe I've got to do both?
I could be wrong, but that's just my view from/dev/chair/user/ktwombley
Reward Zone Program Reward Zone program membership fee is $9.99 for a 1-year membership. It is available to U.S. residents 13 years of age or older. Reward Zone lets you earn points towards reward certificates, which are redeemable towards future in-store purchases. Points are not awarded for online purchases, prior purchases, Gift Cards, sales tax, shipping charges and restocking fees. Full program rules are available in store or at www.MyRewardZone.com.
I don't know why they have to force the PSP down everyone's throats, since they're making as much money as everyone else on the same products...
It's rather simple, actually. The PSP is essentially all profit.
Same thing with the extras they add on. The same ethernet cable you can crimp yourself for pennies costs $30 in the store. The memory card you buy for $20 for your console costs a couple bucks to make.
Ever notice how they don't offer you the sale item when you're walking around your new toy? They offer you some sort of accessory that will give Best Buy more profit than if you just bought the item by itself. The sale items don't have much or any profit; they're to get you into the store to listen to the sales pitches for their other stuff.
Video game systems are a good example of this. Due to competition, no retail store makes anything on the console itself. So if you walk in, pick up an xbox/ps2/gc/whatever, and leave, the company didn't make a dime.
But, when you pick up a couple games, a controller, a memory card, new AV cables, and a PRP to top it all off, Best Buy, or anywhere else for that matter, makes quite a pretty penny.
You goaded these employees into a fight. Even from your one-sided description of the events it's plainly obvious that you were inciting the employees to violence.
I don't think that Best Buy, or any retail store for that matter, benefits by having people verbally assault their employees.
Sure, the guy shouldn't have touched you, but what do you honestly expect? If you honestly expected to curse up a storm in the middle of the store without repurcussion, perhaps you're one of the customers that should be "fired".
Hardly. Simply disagreeing with an interpretation isn't enough to make it invalid.
What you've described here is another valid interpretation. To be honest, I'm more prone to agree with the interpretation you've presented.
The problem is that you've presented this as an open-and-shut case, it is not.
Deutch's interpretation basically says this:
"Listen to yourself, you're talking about probability waves. In other words, you're talking about imaginary photons interfering with real ones. That's ludicrous! How on earth could something imaginary (like photons that could have been) interfere with something real? Answer: they can't; only real things can interfere with real things. Since we see the interference pattern here and there are no real things in our universe to explain it, the only rational solution is to posit the existence of real things in other universes."
Again, I disagree, but that'd Deutch's point, and it's a Pretty Good One.
Many Worlds is an attempt to answer the measurement problem. Another interpretation that solves the measurement problem and is imho rather elegant states that when we measure a system the measurement device becomes entangled with the system, so it enters a superposition of possible states as well. Naturally, since it's in a superposition of states it can't see all of the states, just whichever ones line up with it's particular wave function. This gives rise to the apparent collapse of the wave function.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I agree that many Geek Squad Agents aren't too bright. However, many are. Where do you think some of the future whatever-you-are's work in high school and college? Yeah, these types of jobs.
I'm lucky that I can say at my store I was surrounded by several other smart guys, and some not so smart guys. Now, occasionally a dumb guy would try to fix something, call it fixed, and mess things up. However, that was an exception rather than the norm. Often the dumb guys would leave stuff in the back with notes on them to have someone smarter look at it :)
You have to really understand the situation these guys are in. On the one hand they've got a stream of customers who (rightly) want their computers fixed. On the other hand they've got managers who don't know anything about fixing computers, and would rather have the Geek Squad guys sell more add-on products than fix things. The managers only care about the bottom line. And only in the short-term.
So often they either have to hurry though something because they're not being "productive" (e.g. not selling enough Norton to people), or don't have the tools / replacement parts to fix things that are broken.
The way replacing parts works is this: If the best buy store sells a comparable part, and the repair is covered under warranty or service plan, then the Geek Squad Agent can pull the part off the shelf, install it, and send the customer home. This only works in a very few cases, unfortunately. Anything else has to go to a vendor for repair. The Agent just diagnoses which part is bad, boxes it up, and sends it out. Again, this isn't because the Agent is incompetant, it's because he's not allowed to fix it.
Now, all software-related problems (drivers, spyware, etc.) are done in-store. They don't ship that stuff out to vendors.
Oh, a note about fixing stuff. It's a common joke to say all that they do is just reinstall windows. In my experience, that's just not the case. However, if you really think about it, often it really is the fastest way to do something. If you're on a tight budget for time, would you rather spend a few hours or days carefully researching and repairing some asinine spyware infestation that's so embedded that no spyware cleaners will remove it, or just spend a couple hours backing up, installing windows, and restoring personal data? It just makes good sense in some cases.
In summary: Geek Squad agents, the smart ones, at least, realize the situation they're in, and try to do the best job they can despite the obstacles thrown in their way by Best Buy and their managers. Before I'm flamed by some Geek Squad employees: I admit that my info is a bit dated. I'm sure some things are done differently now. This is my own experience.
Before I'm flamed by some Best Buy haters: I'm not saying Geek Squad is great, or it's the right thing for everybody. In fact, if you're reading /. and actually reading the comments, then Geek Squad is not a product aimed at you. Bitching about Geek Squad (and services like it) on Slashdot is like a Formula 1 pit crew lead telling an 85 year old lady to change her own oil because Jiffy Lube is a rip off. You entirely miss the point.
To answer your question, yeah the bottles were purchased at different stores. At first I swore off the stuff, but later relented.
maybe the percieved lack of carbonation was psychosomatic? the pop was carbonated; it just tasted flat.
so what you're really telling me is that I should try another one?
It was almost flat. There was almost no fizz in the bottle at all. Giving the benefit of the doubt, I bought another bottle of it. Maybe the first one was just bad? Nope. Second one was flat too.
I wish it were a tastier product, I'd love to buy more.
Rock on!
I just got my next 6 passwords.
Thanks!
Unless things have changed recently, no best buy service plan covers damange, accidental or not.
Unfortunately, Geek Squad members are stuck between a rock and a hard place; the customer, who wants their stuff fixed, and Best Buy, who isn't going to shed out a single extra dollar to help out.
At the bench I worked at (laugh if you want) we actually had several bright individuals who really cared about helping customers. We often under charged for some things, and even more often, had to bring tools from home. Geek Squad Agents aren't supplied with OEM disks for anything. No windows install disk, no real software tools, no nothing.
Sure there's an official Geek Squad disk, but it's essentially useless.
Everything they use is either shareware, free software, or pirated.
I must say in my haste to post I didn't RTFA, so I don't know if the alleged (alleged? suuuuuure) pirated software was included on the official Geek Squad disk or not. However, I'm sure the problem is at least 10 times worse than anyone knows.
Original Nature article comparing Britannica and Wikipedia
So I was driving out in the middle of nowhere today and noticed a new e-mail in my gmail inbox. I stopped to see what it was, a friend alerting me to a slashdot story about a brand new blackberry. Ok, I'll bite. I opened up my web browser and checked it out, and laughed to myself as I began typing a reply to my deluded friend. I was interrupted by his IM, and explained to him that the future has already arrived.
Then I decided to get back on the road. I put my PPC-6700 away and merged back into traffic.
Seriously, now. Sorry to sound like a commercial, but I love this device! There's also a windows mobile Treo, the 6700 is also available from Verizon, and several other pdaphones on the way.
By the way, I can connect the phone I have in my pocket to my laptop and get great speeds. Enough , in fact, to play World of Warcraft. With the phone in my pocket. I won't be holding by breath for this new blackberry.
Mod parent +6 Funny.
The obvious problem is that poor people can't afford to uproot themselves entirely and move somewhere totally new and set their life up again.
Anyone with the resources to do is simply isn't concerned about minimum wage.
Turing machines have no problem factorising large primes. I think this is where the confusion is coming in. Yes, they can do it. But no, not quickly. The issue is how fast they can do it. So far, there is very good reason to believe the task of number factorization is in the set of NP problems; problems which cannot be computed in polynomial time, but can be verified in polynomial time (see my original post). An interesting fact about turing machines is that any turing machine can emulate any other turing machine. What this means is that if an algorithm can be computed on a deterministic computer, it can be calulated on any other determistic computer. So the algorithm for factoring these primes on a quantum computer can be computed in polynomial time, right? That means that if the quantum computer is behaving deterministically, we can just implement the algorithm on a standard computer, and it'll finish in polynomial time too. Yes, I agree that the actual mechanism seems deterministic because it uses a deterministic set of steps, and thank you for demonstrating how it works. The problem is, we can do that now. Doing "many calculations at once" is what massively parallel computing is. Since qubits store non-deterministic information, the machine is non-deterministic, and this is the part we can't do right now.
I believe that the actual 'computation' part of the dynamics in quantum computers is purely deterministic. What exactly do you mean by 'computation'? If you mean "the part that does the computing", then it cannot be deterministic. If it is, then we can emulate this using a turing machine (e.g. a standard computer) and thus we'd be able to factor these large composite numbers quickly all along using our desktop computers. I think we're just using clashing terminology here, though. I just wanted to clarify this in case anyone out there is still confused.
In computing they divide problems into several categories. The main players to know are P, and NP. P means "solvable in polynomial time with a deterministic turing machine"; so for an input of size n, you can solve them in n^k calculations. NP are problems that are not solvable in polynomial time with a deterministic turing machine, but are verifiable in polynomial time.
It's very hard to tell which class some problems belong in, but most people agree that factoring large numbers belongs in NP. Heck, some people believe that P=NP. Who knows?
Anyhow, modern cryptography relies on factoring large numbers. As others have already stated, you can't factor large numbers in polynomial time, but you can verify an answer in polynomial time. What that means is that if I tell you "12345 is a factor of 137165295", you can do the division quickly and find out that 137165295/12345=11111, so I was right. The encryption is basically the verification part. Cracking the encryption is basically the factoring part.
Quantum computers aren't fettered by these rules because they are non-deterministic. Essentially, they speed things up by trying everything...at once. I agree it sounds magical, but apparently it works. It is at this point where my knowledge of things gets extremely fuzzy, so I won't even begin to try to explain any of this bad voodoo.
Your target sends their laptop or desktop out to a service center, such as Geek Squad. Using some social engineering you get ahold of their receipt. Call the store daily to see if "your" computer is done. As soon as it is, rush in, pay the balance, and take it home. You can steal whatever they've got stored on it.
Even worse, you might not even have to get their receipt. Call the store claiming to be the person. If they ask for a service order number or something like that, then claim you don't have your receipt with you and give them the magic phrase: "can't you just look me up?" Again, swoop in when the repair's complete, introduce yourself as Mr. Target, pay the balance, and take "your" computer home. They probably won't ask to see your receipt or service contract. If they do, then you already know what to say: "can't you just look me up?"
Sure, service centers have procedures in place to prevent this exact scenario, but people are just way too trusting.
A lot of these are inherited from NeXTStep, but does it matter?
Well, erm, uh... Yes. You can't really call them 'innovations' if they're just using what someone else did.
5. A common area with with a whole bunch of different ram testers.
It may be that I'm more budget-conscious than others, but I think ram testers are a load of crap. They're expensive and quickly become obsolete as new types of ram comes out.
A better solution, IMHO, is a couple known-good barebones PCs. For any modern computer you only need one supporting SDRAM and one supporting DDR. Neither machine needs a hard drive; just a bootable CD-Rom drive with a bootable memtest86 disk.
This setup also doubles as a generic parts tester; you can plug any pci card, hard drive, cd drive, etc. into these barebones machines to verify failure. I use an ultimate boot cd in each machine. It comes with memtest , hard drive diagnostic tools, and a bunch of other diagnostic apps.
Ad implements ldap v3 anyhow, so with a few minor modifications (like schema updates) or tweaks in the source of the application, anything that works with ldap can work with active directory.
I'm a *nix guy so I'd prefer to use FOSS, but the boss says we use Active Directory. So, we do.
Working in the Geek Squad I find that most customers are pretty clueless; they don't know how to set up internet, or if they do, they've got a million popups. Pretty run of the mill.
The other 5% of customers I see are just like this guy. They go to best buy (cause that's where all the pros buy stuff) for some shiny new gadget for their machine, go home and spend all night shoehorning it in, and it doesn't work. Next day they show up at my bench and I've got to fix this idiot's computer and install his new hard drive. $50 well earned.
Most computer professionals can laugh in the face of geek squad all they want. Geek Squad simply isn't for people like us. In other words, if you build cars for a living, you don't go to jiffy lube, and if you build computers for a living, you don't go to geek squad. No need to be dismissive or rude about it; you're simply not the target market. Be pleased that you don't need to spend $120 every couple of months to get your machine de-spywared and move on with your life.
Geek Squad is for the unwashed masses out there. The truely clueless (or even worse, the clueless who think they're clueful). And it does just fine a job at that.
The file i/o abstraction used for everything used to make sense, since just about everything used to make sense as a file. Disks, etc. are fine. Soundcards and USB mice don't make any sense as a file. Overreliance on this abstraction causes a lot of weird counterintuitive interactions with the machine. To set up my mouse I have to do something with /dev/foo/bar/where/did/it/go/ahh/there/it/is/mouse , and that's only if my distro has been kind enough to symlink /dev/whatever/mouse to whatever the mouse *actually* is.
or maybe I've got to echo a 1 into /proc/where/is/that/thingie instead of updating a configuration file. Or maybe I've got to do both?
I could be wrong, but that's just my view from /dev/chair/user/ktwombley
nope, doesn't work.
Reward Zone Program
Reward Zone program membership fee is $9.99 for a 1-year membership. It is available to U.S. residents 13 years of age or older. Reward Zone lets you earn points towards reward certificates, which are redeemable towards future in-store purchases. Points are not awarded for online purchases, prior purchases, Gift Cards, sales tax, shipping charges and restocking fees. Full program rules are available in store or at www.MyRewardZone.com.
source
with that kind of attitude, I can't imagine why Best Buy would hire a consultant to tell them to fire certain customers.
It's rather simple, actually. The PSP is essentially all profit.
Same thing with the extras they add on. The same ethernet cable you can crimp yourself for pennies costs $30 in the store. The memory card you buy for $20 for your console costs a couple bucks to make.
Ever notice how they don't offer you the sale item when you're walking around your new toy? They offer you some sort of accessory that will give Best Buy more profit than if you just bought the item by itself. The sale items don't have much or any profit; they're to get you into the store to listen to the sales pitches for their other stuff.
Video game systems are a good example of this. Due to competition, no retail store makes anything on the console itself. So if you walk in, pick up an xbox/ps2/gc/whatever, and leave, the company didn't make a dime.
But, when you pick up a couple games, a controller, a memory card, new AV cables, and a PRP to top it all off, Best Buy, or anywhere else for that matter, makes quite a pretty penny.
Gimme a break here.
You goaded these employees into a fight. Even from your one-sided description of the events it's plainly obvious that you were inciting the employees to violence.
I don't think that Best Buy, or any retail store for that matter, benefits by having people verbally assault their employees.
Sure, the guy shouldn't have touched you, but what do you honestly expect? If you honestly expected to curse up a storm in the middle of the store without repurcussion, perhaps you're one of the customers that should be "fired".
Hardly. Simply disagreeing with an interpretation isn't enough to make it invalid.
What you've described here is another valid interpretation. To be honest, I'm more prone to agree with the interpretation you've presented.
The problem is that you've presented this as an open-and-shut case, it is not.
Deutch's interpretation basically says this:
"Listen to yourself, you're talking about probability waves. In other words, you're talking about imaginary photons interfering with real ones. That's ludicrous! How on earth could something imaginary (like photons that could have been) interfere with something real? Answer: they can't; only real things can interfere with real things. Since we see the interference pattern here and there are no real things in our universe to explain it, the only rational solution is to posit the existence of real things in other universes."
Again, I disagree, but that'd Deutch's point, and it's a Pretty Good One.
Many Worlds is an attempt to answer the measurement problem. Another interpretation that solves the measurement problem and is imho rather elegant states that when we measure a system the measurement device becomes entangled with the system, so it enters a superposition of possible states as well. Naturally, since it's in a superposition of states it can't see all of the states, just whichever ones line up with it's particular wave function. This gives rise to the apparent collapse of the wave function.