Not really, best buy and any other company of its size are more concerned with tax filings (which should be an "Ah Ha" moment for those of you at home), which generally gives companies an incentive to jack up costs and consequently decrease revenue. If you want a better idea of what their margins actually are you best bet would be to talk to a good (read: independent) investment analyst.

Also, best buy pays ~27 million (adjusting for the time value of money over two years at 2.5% gives us 25 million, btw) for a golden goose they can reuse year over year and had they build it themselves they wouldn't have had it immediately. I don't have all the details, but the project (including legal costs) will likely pay for itself before 5 years is up. They also mitigated any risk with building it themselves and doing it wrong which would cost additional time and money.

As a side note, I am curious if the court decision has any impact on the possible of Best Buy whoring out their duplicate system.

This comment suggests that Best Buy, a publicly traded company, is incentivized to minimize its gross margins. That is an extraordinary claim.

Meanwhile, Best Buy no longer operates the buyback program. The program wasn't a golden goose.

Best Buy is priced in the market in part based on their margins.

That is the nastiest comment I have ever seen on HN. Why?

Your point would be right if companies SEC filing matched their tax filings. Companies are ALLOWED to keep a set of Tax record books and accounting record books and pay taxes based on the profits from their tax books. The Tax books have been screwed with beyond all belief, the SEC ones not so much. My wife is a CPA and I've got a masters of finance and have spent time doing the tax book game.

Its actually better this is happening out side the US. Simply possessing CP in any format, with or without knowledge or consent is illegal. A handful of smart people have written about the situation (and its been featured on HN in the past). In the US, he would likely be far worse off.

> "Simply possessing CP in any format, with or without knowledge or consent is illegal."

From a recent New York State supreme court decision [0], citing federal law on page 12: "to possess the images in the cache, the defendant must, at a minimum, know that the unlawful images are stored on a disk or other tangible material in his possession". And on page 14, "a defendant cannot knowingly acquire or possess that which he or she does not know exists".

Variations of the word "know" appear over and over again in the decision, particularly in the line "knowing the character and content thereof." All three judges concurred on this point -- possession requires knowledge.

[0] http://www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/Decisions/2012/May12/70opn12....

All have anecdotal evidence. All must be right.

That is all.

Not everyone fits into neat little boxes. I read the article imagining using this device myself (and I'm a man!), or using it with a partner (man or woman).

Yeah, that is why I said "average". The average reader here is a white straight male engineer who is not interested in putting things on his rectum.

Ahem. You'd be surprised how many white straight males are indeed interested in that. We've been pleasantly surprised by the popularity of Violet & Rye's straight-couple pegging #realworldsex video on https://makelovenotporn.tv/....:)

Not the majority; wish is usually what is implied with the word "average."

I think what nugget is getting at, is there are many government programs that are mismanaged (welfare, social security, education to some extent, and others). Who legitimately feels good that they pay taxes only to see other Americans living off of Welfare, generations unemployed, living off of welfare (which btw, I consider to be fraud). People that live on welfare (no, not people who use the program as it was intended, as temporary help), don't pay taxes and the benefit from those of us that do pay taxes.

When confronted with situations like the one described above, any rational person would wonder why we want higher taxes, when we should really be focusing on reforming our broken social programs. Only then, when we take legitimate steps to reform our broken social programs, should we be considering higher taxes.

Broken by what measure? Relative to what? Is the government mismanaged compared to say Google? The federal agency I worked for was a much tighter-run ship than the startup I worked for, or the medium-sized tech company I worked for. I'd wager the federal government, or at least most of it, is better-run than most small and medium sized businesses in the US. The caliber of people in most of the agencies is just extremely high compared to what you usually see at all but the top private sector companies.

Many areas of the federal government are actually pretty good by commercial standards (at least for caliber of employee), but most state governments are by comparison pretty horrible (particularly California). However, they're much more concerned with fairness and being abused by third parties, since they aren't as constrained to succeed or die. It is better for an employee of a government entity to follow process 100% correctly and ultimately fail than to take a calculated risk outside of normal process and fail, even if the expected return on the riskier path is far higher, or odds of failure lower. Startups are exactly the opposite, since they die by default. Big businesses are somewhere in between -- a new product failing usually won't kill the business if it fails cleanly, but could if enough corners are cut.

The ultimate difference between private firms and government is that a private firm which is seriously screwed up will go out of business. A government agency can continue being dysfunctional for a long time (e.g. the Office of Thrift Supervision). The other big difference is that when a government entity is incompetent, it tends to hurt others a lot more than when a single commercial firm is incompetent.

I gave you +1 for middlebrow dismissal, you ignored the point I made and simply compared government to the private sector. I don't care how great the private sector manages their business, that is not the topic of discussion. Maybe you should stop wearing your ass as a hat and make a relevant comparison like between our governments and other governments, or between our govt today and our govt 20 years. Comparing apples and oranges isn't an argument. Still, plus 1 for Middlebrow dismissal.

The reason for this is minor's can't be held liable for any contracts they sign, that and companies have boiler plate legal speak that is intended for 99% of their customers.

That being said, there are plenty of ways to get around that limitation, and may well land you in a grey area. On the flip side, because your a minor you can also get away with a lot more.

I would agree that there is grey area, but I would compare this to some guy walking up and commenting on your grey hair, then you, offended, punch him in the face. If we take that to the extremes then maybe it would be harassment or disturbing the peace, but at face value I say your the only person committing a crime there.

Depends on how long the guy who comments on your hair hangs around. Does he move on or does he stay and comment on your nose?

I also call bullshit on this. Google is very open to webmasters,and has a giant like 40 page .pdf available to them strictly about what things get better search results and what things cause negative results or out right panda-ing. The article says right up front about the voting website that they had duplicated content on pages and no one linking to them to boot. Both are known negatives to anyone working in SEO or web today and it has been known for years.

The entire article seemed to be one giant raving contradiction of its self. Companies don't want to hire good people (or for some reason have ignored what they have said), chosen to keep doing things they way that keeps getting them negative results, then moan about it. What happened to the voting website is the very thing thing that Bing would do to them (and probably has done to them).

Now admittedly, Google tends to promote its services above services of other companies, should they be in competing markets. Its unclear if this is by accident (Google engineers probably know the best Google SEO methods after all) or by design. At worst, if it is done by design, then Google is no worse then any other large company. Remember when all the big super markets started producing their own products at cut rate prices? Before when you walked into a Publix, you had 10ft of shelf space devoted to nationally branded ranch dressing. Now you have 5 ft devoted to Publix brand Ranch dressing and 5ft devoted to everything else. So if you are Kraft, your seeing your [eye-ball] search traffic being reduced by half and your competitor now has a much lower price to boot.

Why is it that Kraft doesn't care about that? They don't care, because they have spent the last half decade building their brand and their customer pool. They know that if their loyal customers go into a super market they will see the cheaper supermarket branded ranch dressing first; then second they will see the high priced Kraft and buy Kraft. I can easily extend this analogy to many of the situations presented in the article. When Google enters a market, they are the underdog. Just like when Publix decides to copy another nationally branded product and sell it in their stores. Even if Publix devoted 9 ft to Publix brand Ranch and 1 ft to National brands, on the shelves, Publix still wouldn't capture 90% of the market.

Also, Kraft probably wholesales half the store brand stuff to Publix.

After having a "sales" (read: 95% telemarketing, 5% Misc tasks) job this past summer I can agree with much of what your saying. I gave it a couple months, then I quit (for various reasons, not really worth listing).

The thing is, as much I as absolutely hate saying this completely over-used phrase: the economy is shit. I am personally familiar with 100% commission based telemarketing, which amounts to complete shit, for those of you keeping score at home. Though, supposedly some telemarketers get paid hourly. Either way, its a crappy job but one that people are going to line up to fill so long as its the only job in town.

That's my take.

I gave you +1 for middle brow dismissal.