Items tagged with Fee
Call it an early Christmas gift. As of this weekend, Best Buy has eliminated most restocking fees for returns. That's right folks, now you'll be able to return things to Best Buy without having to pay a pesky fee. The exception to this new policy is special order items, which will have a 25 percent restocking fee. In addition to removing the...
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"It's in the game." That's the slogan that EA Sports has harped on for years. But now, it's only in the game if you buy a game new, or if you cough up even more dough as a used game buyer. We don't necessarily cover too much of the video gaming space here at Hot Hardware, but this particular shift in business practice was simply too glaring...
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We've always heard that the best things in life are free. We've also heard that nothing great lasts forever. Mix those two mantras together, and you get this. Down in Louisiana, a $0.15 surcharge is being tossed around as an idea to stop online criminal activity (and raise state income, no doubt), which would be levied on Internet access across...
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Jack Thompson, best known for his crusade against video games, which he considers to be overly violent and to contain too much sexual content, has been disbarred. His most famous crusade was against Rockstar Games and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, after the famous "Hot Coffee" content was exposed (no pun intended).The Florida Supreme...
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Force feedback has become commonplace in today's game controllers. To many, the simulated forces create a more realistic game-play environment. A group of scientists at the University of Tokyo in Japan are on working on a new technology that can potentially allow force feedback-type sensations and controller input without the need of a joystick...
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We're sure you know about the issues with some NVIDIA mobile GPUs, as earlier in July NVIDIA admitted it was taking a $150 - $200 million charge to cover (emphasis ours):... anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and other consequential costs and expenses arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions...
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You gotta love Steve Ballmer. He's like the crazy uncle at the family reunion that wants to sing karaoke with a lampshade on his head. I imagine that when the Washington Post asked for a wide-ranging interview with the Microsoft CEO, they figured they'd get all sorts of inside spin in Ballmer's tussle with Yahoo! chief Jerry Yang, or maybe...
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McAfee has released its annual "Mapping the Mal Web" report, which reports on "the riskiest and safest places on the Web," after analyzing "9.9 million heavily trafficked Web sites" using its own McAfee Site Advisor technology. Topping the list of most dangerous domains is the .hk domain (Hong Kong); the safest domain is .fi (Finland). Ranked...
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The frequent flyers over at Flight are reporting that iPod connectivity to airlines' in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems are starting to take off: "Singapore Airlines last week started supplying iPod and iPhone connectivity on the first of five newly reconfigured all-business Airbus A340-500s. United Airlines is expected to soon offer this...
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Hacker Safe? We're guessing that applies only to web sites, not securities fraud.One of the researchers behind ScanAlert, the "Hacker Safe" certification company McAfee recently acquired, is facing fraud charges in Indiana.Brett Oliphant, whose title had been vice president of security services before the Napa, California, company was...
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If you're like us here at HotHardware, you use the Internet for everything. But according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the one thing we're not doing much is letting the Internet make up our minds about what we want to buy. Those decisions seem to be more heavily and directly influenced by offline channels like "friends and...
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Yahoo wants your Web searching to be safe. Yahoo has partnered with McAfee to utilize McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology in Yahoo searches to keep Web surfers from visiting would-be harmful sites. In a press release from earlier today, Yahoo stated:"Yahoo!, Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO) and McAfee, Inc. (NYSE:MFE) today announced a partnership to deliver...
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This experiment resembles nothing so much as the Super Size Me experiment, where a man attempted to live on McDonald's food for an entire month. McAfee has started a 30-day study to see just how much junk people can get via spam.The Santa Clara company solicited participants through an ad on Craigslist and chose five people from each...
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People were up in arms when Sony announced its "Fresh Start" no bloatware option - because Sony wanted to charge $50 for it.Starting on Saturday, Sony's Fresh Start software optimization feature will be free, the company announced.Fresh Start is a Sony feature that lets customers buy certain laptops without so-called "bloatware," trial software...
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So you might want to file this one under "huh?" right from the get-go but allows us to expand your horizons a bit anyway. Imagine it's 6:43AM, you're just sitting down at the breakfast table to a couple of english muffins, a bowl of grapenuts, or the lumberjack breakfast. Whatever gets you going in the morning; you get the idea. ...
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Seattle has been a boomtown a half-a-dozen times over the years. Looks like it is again. The entrepreneurs of the digital age seemed to have settled on the Seattle area as the next big thing - the overcast version of Silicon Valley. “The Seattle start-up ecosystem is vibrant, and growing rapidly,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence...
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Starting in May, sellers will no longer be able to give buyers negative, or even neutral feedback.EBay said problems were occurring, and slowing down trade, when buyers left negative comments about sellers who then retaliated with their own views.From May, those selling on eBay will not be able to leave unfavourable or neutral messages about...
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Swedish authorities have been threatening this since last month. They kept their promise.The Swedish prosecutor Hakan Roswall has announced the charges against four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay. The four, aged 23 to 37, are being charged with “assisting copyright infringement” of 4 software applications, 9 films and 22 music...
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The successor to Windows Vista, which is currently codenamed Windows 7, will apparently support multi-touch. That's assuming that users have the proper hardware. We're wondering if this will only be an option for some subsets of users as we know of numerous MMORPGers that have already reported a wave of destroyed monitors in the...
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A simple Internet word game has generated 1,072,025,720 grains of rice for the hungry since it first launched on October 7th, through November 9th. It's easy: each correct word is worth 10 grains of rice. What's the catch? There isn't a catch, for those of us playing, except perhaps some of your time --- and a few ads.An internet word game...
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Given a choice, pay or don't pay? Which would you choose? Or would you at least give a token amount? That's the question asked by a study by comScore. Of those who downloaded Radiohead's digital album, In Rainbows last month, about 62 percent walked away with the music without paying a cent, reported ComScore, an Internet...
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Despite competitors having talking points about how the iPhone battery isn't replaceable, that's not entirely the case. It's true that the user isn't able to buy a battery and swap it out on the road as they can with many existing phones, but Apple can do it for you, for a fee of $85.95 plus applicable taxes: "If your iPhone requires...
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