It's a valid concern yes, but the way he's gone about it is making him, and France, look rather silly (again). It would have been better to note the development of Google's digital library initiative (whatever they call it) and then encourage other libraries to do similiar in order to foster better cultural exchange, etc. etc. online.
Basically he seems to be trying to make Google look like a bad guy here. Google's response is quite appropriate, they can't do everything at once. I seriously doubt they want to stop this with just US libraries, they're a company and there's money to be made moving this into other countries as well.
This guy needs to get his panties out of a wad and work harder at being productive. I don't have anything against the French and their tryng to promote the French language, but making themselves look silly is _NOT_ encouraging that, it's making other people distance themselves from all things French.
At least that would make people (and lawyers) think twice before seeking the maximum penalty and destroying someone's life.
Probably not, how many crimes carry the death penalty in various states but are still being committed on pretty much a daily basis? Some people will never consider the penalties when taking actions, and that includes companies suing and the lawyers representing them. Look at how many people's lifes have been destroyed by the RIAA so far, see any signs of them stopping even in the face of massive public outrage?
Most likely, assuming they win, he'd declare bankruptcy, give up most of his (likely very few, if he is as "kid"-list as other seem to say) assets, and thus pay only a tiny slice of whatever amount they win. This would be a major setback, but unfortunately not all that uncommon of one.
This may vary by state, but in at least some you cannot have judgements dissolved in bankruptcy. My deadbeat dad tried this years ago to get out of the judgement against him for back child support owed -- and failed. In fact he ended up with his wages garnished after that, and it took him until I was about 30 to pay off all the money owed. So bankruptcy's not always an option.
Also, bankruptcy is ceasing to be much of an option for anything except perhaps large companies. Banks and credit card companies have managed to get the laws changed, I think you can't dissolve all, or at least most, of credit card debt anymore so a bankruptcy isn't helpful even if you're drowning in debt. Kinda sad, I'm sure there were some deadbeats who filed it just to avoid paying, but I really doubt _all_ of bankruptcies were like that.
So yes, he doesn't terribly deserve sympathy, but.... What are the penalties being sought? Is Apple going after the maximum allowed by law for this? If so then the penalites far outweight the actual crime. While I don't feel sorry for him (yes, he's old enough to know better and should have known better), I don't think it's right to send someone into financial ruin for the rest of their natural lifes over one fuck up.
Penalize him fairly to punish him for his crime, but leave him a chance in hell to come back from all this and be a productive member of society. If he's going to spend the rest of his life flipping burgers to pay off fines, he'll be completely useless to society, and it wouldn't surprise me if he ended up committing suicide.
So yeah, he's an idiot, but does the punishment truly fit the crime? Is this a case where he could have broken into Apple's HQ, slaughtered the entire Tiger OS team with a hatchet and gotten a lighter sentence? (Note I have no clue what the punishment will be, damn work blocks all blog sites.)
Competition sets the prices, and thats how it should be. If the local stores loose too much money to online vendors, they will have to lower their prices or stop carrying the items all together.
Last I checked, despite years of being vastly underpriced online, and even by Wal-mart although theirs are marked way up too, places like CompUSA and Best Buy are still selling Ethernet cables at way, way, way over cost. Power supplies are the same way (although there's only online competition there.) So no, competition's not working there, it's not fool proof. They do this because the average user has no clue what a cable should cost so they rip them off royally.
You are probably talking about newegg.com, and Zipzoomfly. I run a computer shop, and I simply can't compete with newegg on price, often they are below my cost of me purchasing from a distributor.
On some things yeah, but I was thinking mostly about ethernet cables, which you could still sale far cheaper than places like CompUSA and Best Buy do. Hell, you could buy them online and mark them up 100% and still be way under their prices. That's they kind of thing I was mainly thinking of. I realize there's a lot of things that there's no way to get it lower, but those I don't find 50% cheaper generally. (Also power supplies, I remember that I got a whole freaking cable modem router cheaper than CompUSA wanted for a replacement ATX power supply (the generic one at that) that I needed for my router computer.)
Florida recently banned all smoking in restaurants and it's a wonderful improvement. Smoking and non-smoking "sections" dont mean much when there's only one ventilation system.
Personally I think outright bans are unfair to smokers (I'm a non-smoker and cigarette smoke makes me sick), but you hit on a key point there. I think the fairest way is to leave it up to the resteraunt, but require certain measures to keep the air "safe" for the non-smokers. Things such as seperate dining areas with a dividing wall and door, seperate out-bound air processing or even seperate ventilation systems if that's what is considered safe. That way resteraunts can decide if they want to allow smoking or not and if the costs are worth it. The only potential pitfall is they'd probably have to also require that resteraunts can't force an employee to work in the smoking section, it has to be willing. (So that employee's health isn't jeopardized either.)
I know when I worked at a Wal-mart Supercenter a few years back they had a seperate room built into the break room with a door into it and seperate ventilation for smokers. I didn't have a problem with this at all, the smoke didn't affect me any. It was annoying when all the newspapers ended up in the smoking room though, but that's just people being inconsiderate.
While I think that banning smoking in public places is a good thing, it is difficult to determine to what extent you can tell others what they can do with their own bodies. Where do you draw the line that says these behaviors are too risky and must be discouraged/outlawed and these behaviors are risky but acceptable?
I think it's OK to ban it in public places where there's no way for non-smokers to avoid the smoke (stairwells, elevators for example) and in facilities that do not have a way to seperate the smokers from the nonsmokers. I do think it's a bit overboard to make it illegal to have both in place like a resteraunt. Put restrictions on what qualifies as "safe" seperation sure, but out right banning it is a bit overboard. I do think government has the right to ban smoking in their offices (for employees and visitors alike) since obviously private companies can do this too. It should be done only for good reason though, for instance research does show that second-hand smoke can harm non-smokers, that's a fair reason. Just doing it to jump on the bandwagon's not a fair reason.
Frankly I think the line should be drawn where the behaivor affects others that don't want to be affected. If you want to go motorcyclying without a helmet, fine with me, but your family doesn't have the right to whine and sue everyone when you die because you had a wreck with no helmet on. If you want to smoke fine, just not around me in enclosed spaces (outdoors I can just move away) and not in my home/car. If I'm at your house and you want to smoke, I can't stop you, although if you're my friend I'd hope you would consider that it bothers me before you do.:) (But that's just being courteous, sort of like not farting in front of others, that type of thing.) And yes I apply that to drugs and alcohol too. I don't care if people get drunk, but I very much care if they drink and drive. They can drink themselves literally to death at home if they want, it won't harm anyone else (well their family and loved ones will be harmed emotionally, but not much you can do about that, certainly it's not something to be made illegal).
And yes I'm a non-smoker, and hate cigarette smoke for practical reasons (it gives me horrid headaches, bad enough to make me throw up, so it's definitely harming me), but I also think things are being taken too far. The moves by some companies to start making employees prove they don't smoke or be fired is just wrong. I think at worst the company won't pay any part of the premium on their health insurance would be fair (since that's the reason given for these policies -- to cut health care costs), but why fire them? If they want to smoke and do without health insurance, or pay the entire premium (which will likely be higher than normal for them since they smoke) what's wrong with that?
At the same time though there are far too many smokers who feel they have the right to smoke anywhere, anytime, no matter how it affects those around them. Look people, do you think it's ok for you to get drunk and drive as well? In my case in particular if you smoke around me I'm going to get sick, if your family was that way would you insist on smoking around them and making them sick? It does work both ways, I'll respect your right to smoke as long as you respect my right to not get sick from your smoke. Fair enough?
Do you have any actual evidence that smoking raises total lifetime healthcare costs? Everyone dies of something, and smokers tend yo die younger and quicker, so I'd think it would be a wash.
Smokers appaently have a much higher risk of dying from cancer (or complications from it) and chemotherapy and other treatments are very expensive. If a higher percentage of smokers die of cancer, then yes overall they would cost more in healthcare than nonsmokers. I'm not saying this is indeed the case as I have no figures handy, but it's just as likely to be true as it working out equally.
I smoke, I will smoke when I get a job, I smoke away from people who do not smoke, and I do not litter. Actually, I pick up litter when I see it. I am, what you could call, a clean smoker.
Yes, but think about it, you even label yourself a "clean" smoke, something that shouldn't be necessary. Why do so many smokers (and frankly I've seen very few who don't through their butts on the ground, often even when they're a few feet from an ashtray or garbage can) litter? I know it's not fair to generalize, but like I said from personal experience a good 99 percent of all the smokers I've known, even casually, I've witnessed littering with their cigarette butts. I also rarely see people throw anything besides cigarette butts out their windows, although it obviously happens because there's a lot of litter on the highways.
Of couse, what are cigarette butts made from, paper and cotton, biodegradable materials? I hope that you don't negatively effect the environment in any way.
I'm not so sure of that, have you ever seen one actually degrade? You'll see butts in public that are there forever. It's not that they're getting replaced, as they get other stuff on top of them (gravel, dirt, etc.) but not more butts. The level of accumulation on them grows so that also shows it's not just new ones. From what I know they should biodegrade, but apparently it takes a long, long time for them to do so. I doubt they'll ever degrade very fast, if they did then they migh desolve in the mouth.
why should healthy people be punished for living more responsibly?
Because they're still alive and someone has to pay the bills. That's not meant to be mean, just the way it works out. Even if we provide no care, eventually we'll have to pay someone to dig a grave to dump their dead bodies in and we'd still be screwed (although granted not as much).
It's the same way good drivers are punished by bad drivers. It's law in my state that I have to carry uninsured motorist on my car insurance, even tough it's ALSO law that everyone must have car insurance (every car owner that is). If some uninsured person runs into me and I don't have uninsured motorist coverage I'm up the creek on getting my car fixed and I'll get a ticket with a hefty fine to boot. Keep in mind that's even though I didn't cause the wreck and had insurance on my own car. Here again it's because those who do what they're supposed to are the only ones available to pick up the tab to cover those who don't do their part. It very much sucks.
I should note that the fines and penalties against those without insurance doesn't help much. A lot of them are people who don't care and/or druggies. They'll have a wreck, get ticketed, have their license revoked and still get them a piece of junk car for a couple of hundred and go out and drive anyway. Just now they're both without a license or insurance. The core problem is how do you _make_ people do things when they don't care what you do to punish them for not doing those things? So far we don't know any way to do that.
omething is going wrong here. You'd think economy-of-scale would apply; having more sick people should reduce the cost of health care per person.
How so? The demand goes up, but the supply's not necessarily going to change. You're also assuming that the sick can all continue to contribute to the costs. For those that get fatal cancers, they will often spend many months before dying where they are unable to work, thus lowering the pool of money to pay for the supply, even if it does grow.
That's the main reason it raises the cost of healthcare for everyone, even if your personal bills don't go up, more of your money is going to pay for those sick who can't work. Either from taxes (medicare/medicaid) or out of your insurance premiums. When it comes out of your taxes, it leaves a smaller pot of money to pay for everything else. When it comes out of your premiums, they'll go up because the insurance companies have to cover costs or go out of business. (And if they do go under and you're left without insurance you'll really be paying dearly for other's sickness.)
This doesn't apply just to smokers of course, but smoking is one of the leading causes of cancer (and whether it directly causes it or just weakens the immune system is irrelevant. In either of those cases if you hadn't smoked you likely wouldn't have gotten cancer.) The grand-grand-*-parent was right about fatty foods, the costs associated with obesity is going to start raising healthcare costs as well. I'll bet we'll start seeing unhealthy foods get a sin tax then.
I really can't wait till they levy (higher) taxes on all alcohol products (especially wine) because those products also raise the cost of health care for everyone. I think they also need to tax high fat/high calorie foods for much the same reason.
Your wait's over, I know here in my state, or maybe it's just my county, there are sin taxes on alcohol, even beer.
It's certainly done, just not as uniformly. One of the reasons communities will push for it is to help pay for DUI education (the kind that teaches you NOT to get one, not the after the fact stuff), prevention, etc.
On the other hand, it's in the state's best interest to apply that tax - not only for the immediate tax revenue, but also creating incentive for people to shop in-state.
I don't think they're doing a very good job at that. Something is wrong somewhere when I can go online and get a lot of computer parts/accesories for well under 50% of retail even if I pay shipping & taxes on it. Maybe they should do things to encourage retailers to, say, not mark up Ethernet cables to an absolutely obscene level (especially on long cables like 25' and 50' you can sometimes save over $10 buying them online, and I'm sure the store is still making a profit.)
While I know it's the retailers right to mark things up as they see fit, their being too greedy is what is driving a lot of people online to buy stuff. If states could somehow encourage brick & mortar retailers to keep saner markups, more sales would stay in the state that way, and they'd probably get more in taxes than the haphazard collection they get from various online retailers (and their citizens paying use taxes, how many even realize they're supposed to in states that have them? I honestly have no idea if my state has a use tax or not.)
I know that all of my computer-related purchases (excluding CD-R media, but DVD+R media's bought online) have been online in the past 3-4 years. I don't even bother checking Best Buy or CompUSA anymore, they rarely have any good deals. (I've gotten more good deals from Office Depot lately of all places.)
Lets not toaly blame the movie industry...the retailers would prefer that customers do not return products (as this affects their bottom line).
While Wal-mart's strayed quite a bit from the polices Sam Walton had, this one has remained. Wal-mart does not mind returns, and their returns policies in general are more generous than most other retailers. For most things it's 90 days with a receipt. As long as it's not a case of customer abuse (if you bring in an item with a hatchet sticking out of it they're not going to give your money back obviously) they'll give the money back. They also have a 200% guarantee on most fresh food items, if it's still in date and it's bad you get double your money back. Service desk employees are told to do this automatically (and the register prompts to see if it applies) so you don't even have to ask for it. The only reason the system doesn't apply it automatically is because you do get returns that aren't bad, they're just the person bought too much, or didn't mean to buy them but there's nothing wrong with the item. Even in Electronics where they did crack down last year most items are still under 90 days. Hell, Sanyo TVs have a full 1 year in-store warranty with receipt. (Something I find amazing.) So no, Wal-mart at least is happy to take returns back, they (rightfully I think) take the attitude that they might lose some money now and then, but by keeping the customer happy they'll get more sales.
Returns without a receipt are handled differently but that's because there's so much theft nowadays. Unfortunately most returns without a receipt are generally stolen. Even there though if it's not a very expensive item (there is a cutoff, the registers enforce it but I really can't tell it publically, too much potential for abuse) you don't even need to show ID. Up to another limit you have to show ID and the system tracks how many no-receipt returns you have in a 6 month period. Past another threshold the register will stop allowing them. (And the last one it allows will only do a money-order refuns. That is the customer has to fill out name and address and they will be mailed their refund in money-order form with a letter explaining that they won't be able to get any more refunds without a receipt for a certain time period.)
While I worked there I saw management approve returns without receipt on things that were very obviously much older than the customer was claiming (and we're talking expensive stuff that requires management override even if if they're first one without a receipt). Frankly I didn't believe it myself till I saw it, but yeah they really do take stuff back every day that they lose lots of money on, and it's company policy.
Yet, returns on movies are different, and they didn't used to be. Up till last year management generally would approve refunds for opened movies without receipts. Even though the officially posted policy (both at the service desk and in electronics) was exchange only on opened movies.
So yes, I know where the blame lies here, the change was quite sudden, and it was a move by the studios that caused it.
How is me returning my product a huge victory for movie studios? It is a huge victory for the consumer - as consumer rights beat-up the big company who likes to make threats and false claims.
Because in this case it just hurts the retailer and the movie studio still gets their money even though it's their policy that caused you to have to go to so much trouble to get your money back (as when you dispute the charge on your card). I'm not saying you shouldn't get your money back, just that you're just shifting the victimhood off to another party and the movie studios stuff their pockets with ill-gotten cash and nothing changes. Even if you go that route, at least do something to help the situation. Write the studio that put out the defective movie, tell them you'll never buy another product from them again. Contact your state AG, complain that the st
Maybe you won't be able to get it bundled with your ISP anymore, but I for one will always have a use for it.
Most ISPs offer extremely limited Usenet (Comcast contracts with Giganews for accounts for Comcast customers limited to 2GB a month, unfortunately header traffic counts so even text-only it's easy to run over.) or not at all. Very few ISPs still have their own Usenet servers nowadays, in large part because the daily traffic volume is just insane. It takes a lot of servers, lots of load balancing, lots of redundancy and lots of bandwidth to really provide a usenet feed nowadays. (You also need to peer with a lot of others to make sure you have a complete feed, the paid providers can work out mutual feeds without extra cost (both are using their bandwidth to send and receive posts so it comes out pretty much even). An ISP's news server would have to pay a provider for a feed (very much not cheap) or just contract out (which is what most of them do, providers are happy to work with you to point a hostname (e.g. news.myisp.net) to their servers so your customers won't even know it's not you providing it.)
The only real exception I can think of is Texas.net, but that's because they're part of/owned by/etc. with Giganews.
Compete? On free? How does that pay for the service? Panhandlers at the door?
One of the commercial Usenet providers I pay for access to has a free server for text groups only. It's a token of goodwill to the Usenet community for starters. Text groups take little storage space and miniscule bandwidth in relation to the binary groups. The most heavily trafficked text groups probably have less bytes worth of postings in a year than most binary groups receive in a day. The people paying the company for access are nearly all binary downloaders. The bandwidth's already being paid for by those subscribers, and they utilise over 99.99% of it as well. (For both incoming and outgoing. Also all paid accounts are unlimited downloads, not quota capped.) It's not costing them much, if any money to provide the text server access for free. It also might encourage future business if a user decides to start downloading binaries.
I like it as a customer because I can use it to read text groups from work, even if I'm connected and downloading binaries from home with my paid account. I see it as a benefit, not a wasteful offering.
Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.
They are sorely lacking a few features that there is no good excuse for. For instance, while they can tell me there's no new posts since my last visit in a thread, I'll still have to load the last page and scroll...... till I get to the first post I haven't read. In my newsreader I can tell it I've read posts and filter by unread. Then I see
only the posts I haven't read yet. This is not out of the realm of easily doable, many of these forums are running off of PHP anyway, and track last read article, just provide a viewing option to view threaded, unread only. Simple enough, but I've yet to see it.
How about replies? What really ticks me off about web-based forums is many of the moderator nazis get their panties in a wad if you reply to multiple posts in a thread with, well, multiple posts! You're expected to copy and paste all your replies together, a task that just takes up too much time. If the moderator nazis are going to insist on this, there needs to be a "reply -- add to last reply" button. Frankly it's moronic to insist on this completely, if the replies are lengthy the post quickly becomes unwieldy. People aren't going to read through 100-200 lines of post just to find the part where you quoted and replied to them. This particular failure is because most forums do not use threaded posts, they're just a flat table in chronological order. I've seen a few that thread (Anime On DVD's forums do for instance) but then you get the large threads where it takes 2 minutes to download each page just listing all the headers with links to each post for each level. That's just not a viable option. Usenet readers were handling this better back as far as 1992 in my personal experience, I'm betting it was longer.
Other things that others pointed out as well that could be easily implemented: kill files & filters. How hard can it be? Most software pulls its posts from a database so it can easily just not display posts by users you don't like. (Hell kill-filing would work BETTER because of forced registration to post on most boards), and many of them already filter, cuss words get replaced for instance. If the filtering to check this and change the words as the post is accepted is there, how hard is it to use that function to filter out posts that have certain user-defined key words in them?
Why haven't these easy things been done yet? Personally I think there's a big "we aren't Usenet" mentality and many web forum operators wouldn't enable these features even if they were available. Somehow some people think a web forum is "cooler" than Usenet. How they can think that with it being harder to use and read is beyond me. Hell Slashcode, for all its faults, threads and filters better than 99% of the web forums out there. Exactly how long has Slashdot been around now?
Ahh, you've never even used it, have you? Threads downloaded in a few seconds, in the background for all subscribed groups in any decent newsreader. Hell, response was faster (much, much faster) with plain old rn in 1988 than it is with/. today. Pure text takes very little bandwidth.
Even today it's not slow at all for text only groups. Granted I have broadband at home (4mbps down) but I can load up very active text-only groups on Giganews (which has about 6 months retention in text groups, might be more) and it takes maybe a minute to grab all those headers and thread them. Then I chose what to read, and my read pulls the articles down as I go. Very few are large enough to take even a full second to download and display. I even save bandwidth that way by not getting the bodies for posts I don't care about.
Now if I want to download the million+ headers in a heavily trafficed binary group (the DVD groups seem to have astrononmical header counts) it'll take quite a bit longer, but then I wouldn't be going there for discussion either so would it really matter?
You forget that the MPAA licenses movies to be played on cable. If people start getting their movies via On-Demand, the MPAA should be overjoyed, because they get their demanded cut for each viewing.
Yeah, they'll be tickled about that, but then they'll notice the lowering income from dropped sales in DVD/VHS and complain that they're not getting the new income in addition to the previous DVD/VHS sales. That's what I meant, they'll want to have their cake and eat it too.
Then buy a $40 DVD player known to have problems with such discs so that you can return your DVD player at the same time. What will they blame next?
Nothing, they won't have to. If you're returning the same DVD for exchange every day it makes you look quite suspicious. That will be enough for them to refuse you further refunds/exchanges (on everything), and enough for them to get a restraining order against you to forbid you to enter the store. It is not a public building, but owned by them and they can (and do) do this on occasion, mostly for convicted shoplifters, but sometimes for other abuses.
You're still missing the point, the real culprits are the movie studios, you should be blaming them and finding ways to cause them grief (legally) over what they've done.
"You won't accept my product back?"....{leave store, call credit card company} "Yes they won't accept my product. Please handle it...oh and since i had to make a far journey to walmart i refuse to drive back there, again, to deliver the package. Inform them they can send me a pre-paid usps packing slip/box."
And yes I have done this in the past, got my money back, and had the packing slip sent to me. It wasn't wal-mart (it was best buy). Their other option was to credit me my money, and I keep the product (it was a $100 dvd burner, so they had incentive to send me a packaging box).
Maybe, but it's a dangerous game you're playing. If the store's policies are clearly posted and explicitly deny returns on opened DVDs you can get in trouble for filing a false chargeback with your CC company. In that case they very well may side with the retailer, and tell you that since they offered to exchange it they're not going to do the chargeback. They may also fine you for it.
The bottom line still remains though, no matter what way you might be able to use to get around this, the movie studios have forced this policy into existance, and it's them you should be mad at, not the retailers. The retailers are getting screwed here too because they lose money if they do refund yours, or they lose customers because they do what they've been made to do. When you do something like the above you're really handing the movie studios a HUGE victory. Why reward the assholes who caused this whole mess to start with?
Most shops I know will happily give your money back once you explained them that you have been scammed into buying one of their unplayable media. You can talk loudly in this case, it sometime helps if they refuse.
You're missing that the root of the whole problem is the studios are forcing retailers to lose money on returns unless they made the customer exchange the item, so polices are much less malleable industry-wide.
Talking loudly will not help. I've been on the other side of that counter (as the employee) many times and I can tell you it just makes them think that you're 1. an asshole, 2. have something to hide (e.g. you copied it and are trying to return it now) and 3. are being abusive. All employees have a legal right to refuse to deal with you if you get abusive, and talking loudly is a form of abuse. You are likely to have them call management and/or security and find yourself explaining why you should not be told to leave the premises. I have seen that happen, including the customer being made to leave and the store going to court to get the person forbidden to come near the store for 6+ months.
Getting abusive will only cause you trouble, not get your money back. Normal customers get upset and angry at stupid policies, the crooks get abusive, apparently because they get scared and it comes out that way.
Make a stink. Talk to a manager. I have a friend who was a department manager at Wal-Mart, another who worked there for 6 yrs. The company line (as I was told) is that they will give you your money back if it's less than $100. Customer satisfaction is a big deal. Costs less to keep you happy than lose your business.
Sure, Joe-Wally-World might not be able to do it, but talk to his manager. You will get your money back.
This changed last year on electronics items, most particularly DVDs and VHS. Now management will likely refuse to do anything beyond swapping it, that
IS the official company policy now. In the past management would override this (it was the official policy then too) but now that the store gets hit with the loss, and making sure you beat last year's sales numbers can mean the difference between keeping your job and losing it in management, they won't. Before even if management overrode it the store would get credit from the studio for the return.
Your best bet is to complain to corporate at 1-800-WAL-MART. The local stores get punished under this too, not that that is something new to Wal-mart, but if corporate decides to refund you, management can get corporate to remove that loss from the store's account so they don't get punished.
Actually joe-wally-world was more likely to do these things for you than management in the past if you had your receipt and seemed legit. They'd just do it, and write something that sounds plausible on the defective slip. Claims has to process so many that if it sounds legit they won't notice. They do notice things that are against policy and give it to management to act on. Now though they're too scared to try.
BTW, I can give one great piece of advice, no matter how mad you are, stay polite. If you start ranting and raving and yelling and screaming no one will help you, management included. Why? It makes you look like you're trying to hide something. Being angry but polite makes you look like just that, angry at the policy, but trying to politely find an acceptable solution. Management will be more than happy to let you call Corporate on the store phone in cases where their hands are tied as well (at least when you're polite), and Corporate may resolve it for you and give management the approval you need on the spot.
Regardless of whether you can get your personal situation resolved you most definitely should contact the studio concerned and tell them how displeased you are that their policies caused you to have so much trouble getting your money back for a legitimate problem.
Wal-mart can refuse. Its the biggest company in the world, and it has more wealth than Mansa Musa ever did. I don't see why it lets this mch smaller industry push them around....unless the situation is better for them this way. Now they don't have to bother to keep track of and return such items to the producer. Sounds like Wal-mart has some fault on this one.
Wal-mart has some sway yes, more so in the CD market than DVD/VHS, but they also aren't going to stop selling DVDs/VHS/CDs and the companies know it, which greatly lessens what sway they do have. The reason they won't is because retail makes little to no money on electronics hardware (TVs, VCRs, DVD Players, Stereos, Etc.), they make it all on the media (both blank and prerecorded) and accessories.
This particularly move though was done unilaterally to all retailers at once. It was done under the banner of stopping theft and piracy (those nasty crooks are stealing movies and bringing them back for refunds and/or they're taking them home, copying them and bringing them back). Even Wal-mart would have trouble fighting that, as then they could be made out as supportive of crooks.
You have one other element too, customer abuse, that did not help. Many people have been treating Wal-mart and other stores as free rental shops. They would buy a movie (on DVD or VHS) the day of release, take it home, watch it, come back the next day and claim it didn't work and get a refund. I'm quite sure other retailers experienced this as well. In fact this may have been an element as to why the studios started refusing to credit returns unless they were exchanged.
Your last argument shows a very vast lack of understanding on how retail handles returns though. Even through this new policy there still are legitimate returns where they swap because of a defective disc/tape. Wal-mart stores all have to handle tons of returns even under the current policy, the others wouldn't have added much overheard to costs since the whole processing procedure hasn't changed, there's just fewer to handle. They also still process hundreds of movies a week in each store that they find stolen with the cases left behind. They have more of those in a week than they ever did returns, overall this hasn't impacted their returns processing much at all. Certainly the impact's not been enough to make it worth the customer ire it's caused.
I'm not one to defend Wal-mart, they have more wrong with them than right (especially when it comes to how they treat their employees), but in this case the movie studios are the real culprits, and the blame needs to go to where it belongs.
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Basically he seems to be trying to make Google look like a bad guy here. Google's response is quite appropriate, they can't do everything at once. I seriously doubt they want to stop this with just US libraries, they're a company and there's money to be made moving this into other countries as well.
This guy needs to get his panties out of a wad and work harder at being productive. I don't have anything against the French and their tryng to promote the French language, but making themselves look silly is _NOT_ encouraging that, it's making other people distance themselves from all things French.
Also, bankruptcy is ceasing to be much of an option for anything except perhaps large companies. Banks and credit card companies have managed to get the laws changed, I think you can't dissolve all, or at least most, of credit card debt anymore so a bankruptcy isn't helpful even if you're drowning in debt. Kinda sad, I'm sure there were some deadbeats who filed it just to avoid paying, but I really doubt _all_ of bankruptcies were like that.
Penalize him fairly to punish him for his crime, but leave him a chance in hell to come back from all this and be a productive member of society. If he's going to spend the rest of his life flipping burgers to pay off fines, he'll be completely useless to society, and it wouldn't surprise me if he ended up committing suicide.
So yeah, he's an idiot, but does the punishment truly fit the crime? Is this a case where he could have broken into Apple's HQ, slaughtered the entire Tiger OS team with a hatchet and gotten a lighter sentence? (Note I have no clue what the punishment will be, damn work blocks all blog sites.)
I know when I worked at a Wal-mart Supercenter a few years back they had a seperate room built into the break room with a door into it and seperate ventilation for smokers. I didn't have a problem with this at all, the smoke didn't affect me any. It was annoying when all the newspapers ended up in the smoking room though, but that's just people being inconsiderate.
Frankly I think the line should be drawn where the behaivor affects others that don't want to be affected. If you want to go motorcyclying without a helmet, fine with me, but your family doesn't have the right to whine and sue everyone when you die because you had a wreck with no helmet on. If you want to smoke fine, just not around me in enclosed spaces (outdoors I can just move away) and not in my home/car. If I'm at your house and you want to smoke, I can't stop you, although if you're my friend I'd hope you would consider that it bothers me before you do. :) (But that's just being courteous, sort of like not farting in front of others, that type of thing.) And yes I apply that to drugs and alcohol too. I don't care if people get drunk, but I very much care if they drink and drive. They can drink themselves literally to death at home if they want, it won't harm anyone else (well their family and loved ones will be harmed emotionally, but not much you can do about that, certainly it's not something to be made illegal).
And yes I'm a non-smoker, and hate cigarette smoke for practical reasons (it gives me horrid headaches, bad enough to make me throw up, so it's definitely harming me), but I also think things are being taken too far. The moves by some companies to start making employees prove they don't smoke or be fired is just wrong. I think at worst the company won't pay any part of the premium on their health insurance would be fair (since that's the reason given for these policies -- to cut health care costs), but why fire them? If they want to smoke and do without health insurance, or pay the entire premium (which will likely be higher than normal for them since they smoke) what's wrong with that?
At the same time though there are far too many smokers who feel they have the right to smoke anywhere, anytime, no matter how it affects those around them. Look people, do you think it's ok for you to get drunk and drive as well? In my case in particular if you smoke around me I'm going to get sick, if your family was that way would you insist on smoking around them and making them sick? It does work both ways, I'll respect your right to smoke as long as you respect my right to not get sick from your smoke. Fair enough?
- Yes, but think about it, you even label yourself a "clean" smoke, something that shouldn't be necessary. Why do so many smokers (and frankly I've seen very few who don't through their butts on the ground, often even when they're a few feet from an ashtray or garbage can) litter? I know it's not fair to generalize, but like I said from personal experience a good 99 percent of all the smokers I've known, even casually, I've witnessed littering with their cigarette butts. I also rarely see people throw anything besides cigarette butts out their windows, although it obviously happens because there's a lot of litter on the highways.
Of couse, what are cigarette butts made from, paper and cotton, biodegradable materials? I hope that you don't negatively effect the environment in any way.It's the same way good drivers are punished by bad drivers. It's law in my state that I have to carry uninsured motorist on my car insurance, even tough it's ALSO law that everyone must have car insurance (every car owner that is). If some uninsured person runs into me and I don't have uninsured motorist coverage I'm up the creek on getting my car fixed and I'll get a ticket with a hefty fine to boot. Keep in mind that's even though I didn't cause the wreck and had insurance on my own car. Here again it's because those who do what they're supposed to are the only ones available to pick up the tab to cover those who don't do their part. It very much sucks.
I should note that the fines and penalties against those without insurance doesn't help much. A lot of them are people who don't care and/or druggies. They'll have a wreck, get ticketed, have their license revoked and still get them a piece of junk car for a couple of hundred and go out and drive anyway. Just now they're both without a license or insurance. The core problem is how do you _make_ people do things when they don't care what you do to punish them for not doing those things? So far we don't know any way to do that.
That's the main reason it raises the cost of healthcare for everyone, even if your personal bills don't go up, more of your money is going to pay for those sick who can't work. Either from taxes (medicare/medicaid) or out of your insurance premiums. When it comes out of your taxes, it leaves a smaller pot of money to pay for everything else. When it comes out of your premiums, they'll go up because the insurance companies have to cover costs or go out of business. (And if they do go under and you're left without insurance you'll really be paying dearly for other's sickness.)
This doesn't apply just to smokers of course, but smoking is one of the leading causes of cancer (and whether it directly causes it or just weakens the immune system is irrelevant. In either of those cases if you hadn't smoked you likely wouldn't have gotten cancer.) The grand-grand-*-parent was right about fatty foods, the costs associated with obesity is going to start raising healthcare costs as well. I'll bet we'll start seeing unhealthy foods get a sin tax then.
It's certainly done, just not as uniformly. One of the reasons communities will push for it is to help pay for DUI education (the kind that teaches you NOT to get one, not the after the fact stuff), prevention, etc.
While I know it's the retailers right to mark things up as they see fit, their being too greedy is what is driving a lot of people online to buy stuff. If states could somehow encourage brick & mortar retailers to keep saner markups, more sales would stay in the state that way, and they'd probably get more in taxes than the haphazard collection they get from various online retailers (and their citizens paying use taxes, how many even realize they're supposed to in states that have them? I honestly have no idea if my state has a use tax or not.)
I know that all of my computer-related purchases (excluding CD-R media, but DVD+R media's bought online) have been online in the past 3-4 years. I don't even bother checking Best Buy or CompUSA anymore, they rarely have any good deals. (I've gotten more good deals from Office Depot lately of all places.)
Returns without a receipt are handled differently but that's because there's so much theft nowadays. Unfortunately most returns without a receipt are generally stolen. Even there though if it's not a very expensive item (there is a cutoff, the registers enforce it but I really can't tell it publically, too much potential for abuse) you don't even need to show ID. Up to another limit you have to show ID and the system tracks how many no-receipt returns you have in a 6 month period. Past another threshold the register will stop allowing them. (And the last one it allows will only do a money-order refuns. That is the customer has to fill out name and address and they will be mailed their refund in money-order form with a letter explaining that they won't be able to get any more refunds without a receipt for a certain time period.)
While I worked there I saw management approve returns without receipt on things that were very obviously much older than the customer was claiming (and we're talking expensive stuff that requires management override even if if they're first one without a receipt). Frankly I didn't believe it myself till I saw it, but yeah they really do take stuff back every day that they lose lots of money on, and it's company policy.
Yet, returns on movies are different, and they didn't used to be. Up till last year management generally would approve refunds for opened movies without receipts. Even though the officially posted policy (both at the service desk and in electronics) was exchange only on opened movies.
So yes, I know where the blame lies here, the change was quite sudden, and it was a move by the studios that caused it.
How is me returning my product a huge victory for movie studios? It is a huge victory for the consumer - as consumer rights beat-up the big company who likes to make threats and false claims.
The only real exception I can think of is Texas.net, but that's because they're part of/owned by/etc. with Giganews.
I like it as a customer because I can use it to read text groups from work, even if I'm connected and downloading binaries from home with my paid account. I see it as a benefit, not a wasteful offering.
How about replies? What really ticks me off about web-based forums is many of the moderator nazis get their panties in a wad if you reply to multiple posts in a thread with, well, multiple posts! You're expected to copy and paste all your replies together, a task that just takes up too much time. If the moderator nazis are going to insist on this, there needs to be a "reply -- add to last reply" button. Frankly it's moronic to insist on this completely, if the replies are lengthy the post quickly becomes unwieldy. People aren't going to read through 100-200 lines of post just to find the part where you quoted and replied to them. This particular failure is because most forums do not use threaded posts, they're just a flat table in chronological order. I've seen a few that thread (Anime On DVD's forums do for instance) but then you get the large threads where it takes 2 minutes to download each page just listing all the headers with links to each post for each level. That's just not a viable option. Usenet readers were handling this better back as far as 1992 in my personal experience, I'm betting it was longer.
Other things that others pointed out as well that could be easily implemented: kill files & filters. How hard can it be? Most software pulls its posts from a database so it can easily just not display posts by users you don't like. (Hell kill-filing would work BETTER because of forced registration to post on most boards), and many of them already filter, cuss words get replaced for instance. If the filtering to check this and change the words as the post is accepted is there, how hard is it to use that function to filter out posts that have certain user-defined key words in them?
Why haven't these easy things been done yet? Personally I think there's a big "we aren't Usenet" mentality and many web forum operators wouldn't enable these features even if they were available. Somehow some people think a web forum is "cooler" than Usenet. How they can think that with it being harder to use and read is beyond me. Hell Slashcode, for all its faults, threads and filters better than 99% of the web forums out there. Exactly how long has Slashdot been around now?
Now if I want to download the million+ headers in a heavily trafficed binary group (the DVD groups seem to have astrononmical header counts) it'll take quite a bit longer, but then I wouldn't be going there for discussion either so would it really matter?
You're still missing the point, the real culprits are the movie studios, you should be blaming them and finding ways to cause them grief (legally) over what they've done.
And yes I have done this in the past, got my money back, and had the packing slip sent to me. It wasn't wal-mart (it was best buy). Their other option was to credit me my money, and I keep the product (it was a $100 dvd burner, so they had incentive to send me a packaging box).
The bottom line still remains though, no matter what way you might be able to use to get around this, the movie studios have forced this policy into existance, and it's them you should be mad at, not the retailers. The retailers are getting screwed here too because they lose money if they do refund yours, or they lose customers because they do what they've been made to do. When you do something like the above you're really handing the movie studios a HUGE victory. Why reward the assholes who caused this whole mess to start with?
Talking loudly will not help. I've been on the other side of that counter (as the employee) many times and I can tell you it just makes them think that you're 1. an asshole, 2. have something to hide (e.g. you copied it and are trying to return it now) and 3. are being abusive. All employees have a legal right to refuse to deal with you if you get abusive, and talking loudly is a form of abuse. You are likely to have them call management and/or security and find yourself explaining why you should not be told to leave the premises. I have seen that happen, including the customer being made to leave and the store going to court to get the person forbidden to come near the store for 6+ months.
Getting abusive will only cause you trouble, not get your money back. Normal customers get upset and angry at stupid policies, the crooks get abusive, apparently because they get scared and it comes out that way.
Sure, Joe-Wally-World might not be able to do it, but talk to his manager. You will get your money back.
Your best bet is to complain to corporate at 1-800-WAL-MART. The local stores get punished under this too, not that that is something new to Wal-mart, but if corporate decides to refund you, management can get corporate to remove that loss from the store's account so they don't get punished.
Actually joe-wally-world was more likely to do these things for you than management in the past if you had your receipt and seemed legit. They'd just do it, and write something that sounds plausible on the defective slip. Claims has to process so many that if it sounds legit they won't notice. They do notice things that are against policy and give it to management to act on. Now though they're too scared to try.
BTW, I can give one great piece of advice, no matter how mad you are, stay polite. If you start ranting and raving and yelling and screaming no one will help you, management included. Why? It makes you look like you're trying to hide something. Being angry but polite makes you look like just that, angry at the policy, but trying to politely find an acceptable solution. Management will be more than happy to let you call Corporate on the store phone in cases where their hands are tied as well (at least when you're polite), and Corporate may resolve it for you and give management the approval you need on the spot.
Regardless of whether you can get your personal situation resolved you most definitely should contact the studio concerned and tell them how displeased you are that their policies caused you to have so much trouble getting your money back for a legitimate problem.
This particularly move though was done unilaterally to all retailers at once. It was done under the banner of stopping theft and piracy (those nasty crooks are stealing movies and bringing them back for refunds and/or they're taking them home, copying them and bringing them back). Even Wal-mart would have trouble fighting that, as then they could be made out as supportive of crooks.
You have one other element too, customer abuse, that did not help. Many people have been treating Wal-mart and other stores as free rental shops. They would buy a movie (on DVD or VHS) the day of release, take it home, watch it, come back the next day and claim it didn't work and get a refund. I'm quite sure other retailers experienced this as well. In fact this may have been an element as to why the studios started refusing to credit returns unless they were exchanged.
Your last argument shows a very vast lack of understanding on how retail handles returns though. Even through this new policy there still are legitimate returns where they swap because of a defective disc/tape. Wal-mart stores all have to handle tons of returns even under the current policy, the others wouldn't have added much overheard to costs since the whole processing procedure hasn't changed, there's just fewer to handle. They also still process hundreds of movies a week in each store that they find stolen with the cases left behind. They have more of those in a week than they ever did returns, overall this hasn't impacted their returns processing much at all. Certainly the impact's not been enough to make it worth the customer ire it's caused.
I'm not one to defend Wal-mart, they have more wrong with them than right (especially when it comes to how they treat their employees), but in this case the movie studios are the real culprits, and the blame needs to go to where it belongs.