>>>You can't really expect them to give you anything except what they're selling for without a receipt, can you?
No I'd probably do the same thing if I were a store owner. However that wasn't my point. I was refuting that previous message which said "you can return christmas persents without receipt". While that's technically true, oftentimes you only get back ~25% of what was originally paid. It's better to have a receipt.
First off, Japan ALWAYS leads the world in technology. I don't know why, but they do. They had HDTV in 1985!!! (It was called MUSE, it was analog, and produced 1035i images.) So news articles about Japan having the world's fastest internet is no surprise to me. It's always been that way.
Second, the rest of the world is pretty much even. The average bitrate for the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Australia is virtually identical - around 10 Megabit/sec. I'm not really concerned about the U.S. falling behind the E.U. or the rest of the world. We're keeping pace.
And yes Americans concentrate, but there's still a lot of space in-between. When I lived in Oklahoma City, the ~40th largest market according to Nielsen, a lot of my coworkers still had dialup. That's because (1) OKC is like a metro island in the middle of nowhere, isolated from the rest of the nation, and (2) a lot of residents live on the fringes (suburban sprawl). People in OKC have high-speed internet, but outside OKC its mostly just phone connections or satellite. (Not even cable tv.)
>>>Amazon's MP3 store would still have an advantage over iTunes.
Yeah except for the fact that MP3 is inferior to AAC. I prefer to buy my stuff in the newer AAC format (or AAC+ SBR if it's available). Similarly I prefer my downloadable videos to use some variant of the newer MPEG4-format rather than MPEG2.
>>>they'll give you back the current sale price on a gift card
The problem with that is on December 25, stores immediately mark everything down. One time my young niece gave me a shirt that she said cost her "20 dollars". The tag actually said 29.99 so she got a 33% off discount. ----- I returned the shirt on December 26, showed the clerk the tag and said my grandma had a 33% off discount, so please refund $19.99. However because I didn't have a receipt, all they gave me was the current clearance price of $4.99!!!! Stores are not dumb, and will take any opportunity they can to defraud a customer. In this case they pocketed fifteen dollars of my niece's money.:-(
>>> Walmart has very customer friendly return policies in their bricks-and-mortar stores.
Not really. I bought a bunch of compact fluorescent bulbs, tried them in my house for a few months, and discovered they were waaaay too dim (it takes about 5 minutes to reach full brightness). I rarely visit Walmart, due to constantly being on the road, but I did eventually return to the store. Walmart refused to refund because, "The date on the receipt is from 6 months ago, and we don't even sell these any more." I thought that sounded reasonable, but still double-checked the shelves and discovered they had lied. They were selling tons of the identical bulbs.
I immediately demanded a refund, telling the assistant manager that she can "sell these unopened, like-new bulbs to somebody else, and there's no valid reason to turn me down". She still refused to do it, until I used my cellphone to call my credit card company & asked them to reverse the charge "on some defective product". Then suddenly the ass. manager changed her mind and offered me a $30 gift card. I accepted. ----- Offering me a gift card is what she should have done *immediately* rather than lie to me & claim the bulbs were no longer being sold. Never lie to a customer.
----- In another case, I returned a Defective DVD after just one week. They said, "We do exchanges only," but since that DVD was sold-out, I got nothing. So in effect Walmart sold me a broken dvd; how nice of them. (I did eventually recover my money through my credit card, but it took a few weeks.)
I think Walmart has the worst customer service of any national store.
Sometimes in order to catch a thief, you have to use the tactics of a thief (deception, buying black market goods, and using weapons). Example: Dish Network sold me a digital tuner box which was so poorly-programmed, it barely worked. A few months later Dish released v1.06 with all the bugs removed, and since my warranty was still good, I asked to exchange boxes.
Dish refused saying they had no record of me as a customer. They lost the sale! Idiots. So since Dish effectively defrauded me, I decided to borrow a page from the same book. (1) I bought a brand-new revision v.106 box. (2) When the package arrived, I swapped the tuners and returned my defective v1.00 box. (3) I contacted my credit card company, explained the situation, and provided proof the item was returned to Dish. (4) The credit company reversed the charge. (5) It costs me about 5 dollars in postage, but at least now I have a working digital tuner.
Dish tried to scam me via selling a defective box, and failed. And now Walmart's trying to do the same thing; if necessary I would find a way to recover the money. Perhaps the credit card company could reverse the charge for this now-broken DRM and worthless Walmart music. If not there are other ways your credit card could help you recover the money you lost.
Most likely Walmart music is only warrantied to work for 90 days, after which time Walmart is no longer required to "fix" it when it stops working...... similar to how Walmart is not required to replace my old 1990s-era cassettes if they happen to tear in half.
I have not bought any DRM'd music yet, but if I had, I would keep those legally-purchased copies & download "backup" copies off bittorrent. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that we are allowed to have backup copies as long as we have the original purchased song (or video or game or whatever).
Well I have $50,000 in one bank, $60,000 in another, and $80,000 in a third bank.
And I'm worried. Like I said the Fed is running out of money. Last I heard they only have 0.2 trillion in reserve. Which means if the whole banking system starts to collapse (as happened in 1929 and 30), the Fed won't be able to insure everyone's savings. The money will simply disappear, and I will have lost a huge chunk of money.
That's why the Fed went to Congress; the Federal Reserve is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy itself & needs Congress to prop it up.
~50 million is how many people rely solely on over-the-air television. I have no idea how many use large 20-25 dB antennas, but there are a lot of farmers & other rural residents spread across this continent, and they only receive television because they have antennas on their roofs. (Typically VHF channels since they operate better across long flat prairie.) They won't be happy if their television suddenly disappears because somebody turned on his White-space enabled Ipod.
We'll have a better understanding of the problem's true size come March 2009 when people lose analog. That will give us a rough idea of how many people watch long-distance television. If the FCC gets flooded with millions of calls, it (or Congress) may decide to reject white-space gadgets simply to avoid a repeat.
>>>He's not IN that official market to begin with and he's DX-ing the stations. The FCC won't care
Actually I *am* inside the Washington D.C. Designated Market Area (DMA) which at its far edge reaches approximately 80 miles from the city. Both the FCC and the stations will care if viewers inside their DMA can not view these stations.
Well I've got Verizon, and nbc.com is not slow at all. If you are observing video freezing, then that's probably your Comcast filtering in action. (They are prioritizing other users as being more important than your nbc.com stream.)
Do you think Comcast is the only one? Other ISPs are now saying, "Comcast's filtering is good idea," and implementing the same technology. Pretty soon you won't be able to stream Internet TV whether you're with Cox, Time-Warnr, Verizon, Dish, or some other provider.
Broadcasting companies that shred letters from their viewers will get slapped by a heavy fine from the FCC. They are required to keep ALL viewer correspondence for public review by the government.
How to define "Constitution" is already defined by the Constitution itself, which states all amendments will have the same power & affect as the original articles. The Right to free speech IS a part of the Constitution. (It's also enshrined in virtually all state constitutions.)
Well the alternative is that YOUR bank closes-down, and takes your life savings with it. (And before you "it's insured", remember that the reason the Fed is asking Congress for help, is because they are almost out of money. FDIC can't return your money to you if the Fed's wallet is empty.)
>>>BTW, 700 billion isn't much
Not much??? At my upper-middle class salary, it would still take *7 million years* for me to earn that much money. That sounds like a really big bill to my ears.
Also eventually all ISPs would become like cable channels - they are not regulated by the FCC, and yet they still censor every little nipple slip or nudity or sex scene. Cable channels justify this censorship "because children might be watching" and ISPs would do the same thing for the same reason. (Goodbye playboy.com, goodbye violent websites.)
I prefer that ISPs remain *neutral* and censor nothing. Let ME figure-out what I will or will not access.
I'm sick of cable corporations acting like surrogate parents - this you can watch; this we will protect you from seeing. I don't want my ISP to start doing the same thing.
Exactly. Even if Adobe had encryption, there are still ways to capture anything shown on the screen. One solution uses software to do screen image captures 10, 15, or 30 times a second. If that doesn't work, a less-elegant but still workable solution is to point a camcorder at the screen and press record.
Although, I'm not sure why somebody would even *want* to capture streaming video. (1) Its bitrate is low and poor quality (typically 500 kbit/s). Plus (2) you can buy the content cheaply ($30-50 per television season) so it's not worth the effort to try to capture it (imho). Clicking "buy" on amazon is so much easier.
Even as recently as 2002 you could buy a 44mpg highway Civic. No, not a hybrid - it was the "HX" model with lean-burn engine.
The carmakers are deliberately pushing hybrids because they are "sexy", but really any sufficiently small engine will get great economy. VW sold a gasoline Lupo that got 60mpg in Europe, a diesel version that got almost 90mpg, and soon will be releasing a 2-seater that gets 250 mpg (all highway numbers).
I think they should have to refund money back to the customers. Back when the Record Companies were accused of CD price-fixing, that was the punishment they received. My family only got $44 ($22 for me and $22 for my mother), but that's still better than giving it to the politicians where it can be misappropriated on nonsense (like studying butterfly sex).
Paypal received a similar punishment (I got $54 that time), albeit for different reasons.
When my boss asks me to work overtime, I just track all my unpaid hours.
And then I take off that number of hours at the end of the year (or any other slow period). I am not going to work a bunch of free hours such that my effective hourly rate drops to just $17 an hour. I can get better pay at the local factory.
Al Gore did nothing to stop Bin Laden from striking the USS Cole, the Oklahoma Federal Building (suspected to be Bin Laden), or the World Trade Center in 1990s. Likewise he would have done nothing to stop 9/11.
Well let's see: $400 per year (satellite monopoly) versus $0.00 (over the air). I think I prefer the second option.
And yes you're right I can afford that $400 a year, but what about my neighbors? If their over-the-air reception gets blocked by white-space operating Ipods broadcasting all over the place, can my neighbors afford $400 a year? No way! Not with their $7 an hour Walmart jobs. (You see, I try to think of OTHER people, not just my own selfish interests.)
We television viewers already gave-up channels 52 to 83. Take your whitespace gadgets and use them THERE, and leave the lower channels alone.
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>>>You can't really expect them to give you anything except what they're selling for without a receipt, can you?
No I'd probably do the same thing if I were a store owner. However that wasn't my point. I was refuting that previous message which said "you can return christmas persents without receipt". While that's technically true, oftentimes you only get back ~25% of what was originally paid. It's better to have a receipt.
(1) Why spend $100 to file a case about a $70 box? That's a very poor opportunity cost.
(2) Why go to court when there are legal remedies (such as credit card regulations) to resolve the problem for free? I chose number 2.
Like I care what the Tyrant RIAA thinks.
First off, Japan ALWAYS leads the world in technology. I don't know why, but they do. They had HDTV in 1985!!! (It was called MUSE, it was analog, and produced 1035i images.) So news articles about Japan having the world's fastest internet is no surprise to me. It's always been that way.
Second, the rest of the world is pretty much even. The average bitrate for the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Australia is virtually identical - around 10 Megabit/sec. I'm not really concerned about the U.S. falling behind the E.U. or the rest of the world. We're keeping pace.
And yes Americans concentrate, but there's still a lot of space in-between. When I lived in Oklahoma City, the ~40th largest market according to Nielsen, a lot of my coworkers still had dialup. That's because (1) OKC is like a metro island in the middle of nowhere, isolated from the rest of the nation, and (2) a lot of residents live on the fringes (suburban sprawl). People in OKC have high-speed internet, but outside OKC its mostly just phone connections or satellite. (Not even cable tv.)
>>>Amazon's MP3 store would still have an advantage over iTunes.
Yeah except for the fact that MP3 is inferior to AAC. I prefer to buy my stuff in the newer AAC format (or AAC+ SBR if it's available). Similarly I prefer my downloadable videos to use some variant of the newer MPEG4-format rather than MPEG2.
>>>they'll give you back the current sale price on a gift card
The problem with that is on December 25, stores immediately mark everything down. One time my young niece gave me a shirt that she said cost her "20 dollars". The tag actually said 29.99 so she got a 33% off discount. ----- I returned the shirt on December 26, showed the clerk the tag and said my grandma had a 33% off discount, so please refund $19.99. However because I didn't have a receipt, all they gave me was the current clearance price of $4.99!!!! Stores are not dumb, and will take any opportunity they can to defraud a customer. In this case they pocketed fifteen dollars of my niece's money. :-(
>>> Walmart has very customer friendly return policies in their bricks-and-mortar stores.
Not really. I bought a bunch of compact fluorescent bulbs, tried them in my house for a few months, and discovered they were waaaay too dim (it takes about 5 minutes to reach full brightness). I rarely visit Walmart, due to constantly being on the road, but I did eventually return to the store. Walmart refused to refund because, "The date on the receipt is from 6 months ago, and we don't even sell these any more." I thought that sounded reasonable, but still double-checked the shelves and discovered they had lied. They were selling tons of the identical bulbs.
I immediately demanded a refund, telling the assistant manager that she can "sell these unopened, like-new bulbs to somebody else, and there's no valid reason to turn me down". She still refused to do it, until I used my cellphone to call my credit card company & asked them to reverse the charge "on some defective product". Then suddenly the ass. manager changed her mind and offered me a $30 gift card. I accepted. ----- Offering me a gift card is what she should have done *immediately* rather than lie to me & claim the bulbs were no longer being sold. Never lie to a customer.
----- In another case, I returned a Defective DVD after just one week. They said, "We do exchanges only," but since that DVD was sold-out, I got nothing. So in effect Walmart sold me a broken dvd; how nice of them. (I did eventually recover my money through my credit card, but it took a few weeks.)
I think Walmart has the worst customer service of any national store.
Sometimes in order to catch a thief, you have to use the tactics of a thief (deception, buying black market goods, and using weapons). Example: Dish Network sold me a digital tuner box which was so poorly-programmed, it barely worked. A few months later Dish released v1.06 with all the bugs removed, and since my warranty was still good, I asked to exchange boxes.
Dish refused saying they had no record of me as a customer. They lost the sale! Idiots. So since Dish effectively defrauded me, I decided to borrow a page from the same book. (1) I bought a brand-new revision v.106 box. (2) When the package arrived, I swapped the tuners and returned my defective v1.00 box. (3) I contacted my credit card company, explained the situation, and provided proof the item was returned to Dish. (4) The credit company reversed the charge. (5) It costs me about 5 dollars in postage, but at least now I have a working digital tuner.
Dish tried to scam me via selling a defective box, and failed. And now Walmart's trying to do the same thing; if necessary I would find a way to recover the money. Perhaps the credit card company could reverse the charge for this now-broken DRM and worthless Walmart music. If not there are other ways your credit card could help you recover the money you lost.
Most likely Walmart music is only warrantied to work for 90 days, after which time Walmart is no longer required to "fix" it when it stops working...... similar to how Walmart is not required to replace my old 1990s-era cassettes if they happen to tear in half.
I have not bought any DRM'd music yet, but if I had, I would keep those legally-purchased copies & download "backup" copies off bittorrent. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that we are allowed to have backup copies as long as we have the original purchased song (or video or game or whatever).
.
Well I have $50,000 in one bank, $60,000 in another, and $80,000 in a third bank.
And I'm worried. Like I said the Fed is running out of money. Last I heard they only have 0.2 trillion in reserve. Which means if the whole banking system starts to collapse (as happened in 1929 and 30), the Fed won't be able to insure everyone's savings. The money will simply disappear, and I will have lost a huge chunk of money.
That's why the Fed went to Congress; the Federal Reserve is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy itself & needs Congress to prop it up.
~50 million is how many people rely solely on over-the-air television. I have no idea how many use large 20-25 dB antennas, but there are a lot of farmers & other rural residents spread across this continent, and they only receive television because they have antennas on their roofs. (Typically VHF channels since they operate better across long flat prairie.) They won't be happy if their television suddenly disappears because somebody turned on his White-space enabled Ipod.
We'll have a better understanding of the problem's true size come March 2009 when people lose analog. That will give us a rough idea of how many people watch long-distance television. If the FCC gets flooded with millions of calls, it (or Congress) may decide to reject white-space gadgets simply to avoid a repeat.
>>>He's not IN that official market to begin with and he's DX-ing the stations. The FCC won't care
Actually I *am* inside the Washington D.C. Designated Market Area (DMA) which at its far edge reaches approximately 80 miles from the city. Both the FCC and the stations will care if viewers inside their DMA can not view these stations.
Well I've got Verizon, and nbc.com is not slow at all. If you are observing video freezing, then that's probably your Comcast filtering in action. (They are prioritizing other users as being more important than your nbc.com stream.)
Do you think Comcast is the only one? Other ISPs are now saying, "Comcast's filtering is good idea," and implementing the same technology. Pretty soon you won't be able to stream Internet TV whether you're with Cox, Time-Warnr, Verizon, Dish, or some other provider.
Haven't you heard?
The various state governments are conspiring with ISPs to shutdown Usenet.
Broadcasting companies that shred letters from their viewers will get slapped by a heavy fine from the FCC. They are required to keep ALL viewer correspondence for public review by the government.
How to define "Constitution" is already defined by the Constitution itself, which states all amendments will have the same power & affect as the original articles. The Right to free speech IS a part of the Constitution. (It's also enshrined in virtually all state constitutions.)
Well the alternative is that YOUR bank closes-down, and takes your life savings with it. (And before you "it's insured", remember that the reason the Fed is asking Congress for help, is because they are almost out of money. FDIC can't return your money to you if the Fed's wallet is empty.)
>>>BTW, 700 billion isn't much
Not much??? At my upper-middle class salary, it would still take *7 million years* for me to earn that much money. That sounds like a really big bill to my ears.
Also eventually all ISPs would become like cable channels - they are not regulated by the FCC, and yet they still censor every little nipple slip or nudity or sex scene. Cable channels justify this censorship "because children might be watching" and ISPs would do the same thing for the same reason. (Goodbye playboy.com, goodbye violent websites.)
I prefer that ISPs remain *neutral* and censor nothing. Let ME figure-out what I will or will not access.
I'm sick of cable corporations acting like surrogate parents - this you can watch; this we will protect you from seeing. I don't want my ISP to start doing the same thing.
Exactly. Even if Adobe had encryption, there are still ways to capture anything shown on the screen. One solution uses software to do screen image captures 10, 15, or 30 times a second. If that doesn't work, a less-elegant but still workable solution is to point a camcorder at the screen and press record.
Although, I'm not sure why somebody would even *want* to capture streaming video. (1) Its bitrate is low and poor quality (typically 500 kbit/s). Plus (2) you can buy the content cheaply ($30-50 per television season) so it's not worth the effort to try to capture it (imho). Clicking "buy" on amazon is so much easier.
Even as recently as 2002 you could buy a 44mpg highway Civic. No, not a hybrid - it was the "HX" model with lean-burn engine.
The carmakers are deliberately pushing hybrids because they are "sexy", but really any sufficiently small engine will get great economy. VW sold a gasoline Lupo that got 60mpg in Europe, a diesel version that got almost 90mpg, and soon will be releasing a 2-seater that gets 250 mpg (all highway numbers).
I think they should have to refund money back to the customers. Back when the Record Companies were accused of CD price-fixing, that was the punishment they received. My family only got $44 ($22 for me and $22 for my mother), but that's still better than giving it to the politicians where it can be misappropriated on nonsense (like studying butterfly sex).
Paypal received a similar punishment (I got $54 that time), albeit for different reasons.
When my boss asks me to work overtime, I just track all my unpaid hours.
And then I take off that number of hours at the end of the year (or any other slow period). I am not going to work a bunch of free hours such that my effective hourly rate drops to just $17 an hour. I can get better pay at the local factory.
spamcop.net probably has the absolute best filtering, although you have to pay for it.
And yes I agree a whitelist that only allows kids to receive email from approved addresses is probably the best bet.
Al Gore did nothing to stop Bin Laden from striking the USS Cole, the Oklahoma Federal Building (suspected to be Bin Laden), or the World Trade Center in 1990s. Likewise he would have done nothing to stop 9/11.
Well let's see: $400 per year (satellite monopoly) versus $0.00 (over the air). I think I prefer the second option.
And yes you're right I can afford that $400 a year, but what about my neighbors? If their over-the-air reception gets blocked by white-space operating Ipods broadcasting all over the place, can my neighbors afford $400 a year? No way! Not with their $7 an hour Walmart jobs. (You see, I try to think of OTHER people, not just my own selfish interests.)
We television viewers already gave-up channels 52 to 83. Take your whitespace gadgets and use them THERE, and leave the lower channels alone.