Posted on 09/23/2009 11:12:20 AM PDT by iowamark
(SPRINGFIELD, Mass.) — A former postal service employee has pleaded guilty to stealing more than 30,000 DVDs that moved through a western Massachusetts post office...
Federal prosecutors say the movie rental company alerted Springfield post office officials that a suspiciously high number of DVDs were disappearing. As many as 100 movies a week were disappearing.
Weathers was arrested in February 2008 after investigators filmed him taking DVDs from packages and slipping them into his backpack.
He faces 10 months to 16 months in prison and restitution costs of about $38,000 at his Dec. 23 sentencing....
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
I suspected it had been stolen, and never did that again.
Netflix is good about forgiving a few missing DVDs, luckily.
That’s less time than Plaxico Burress got for asserting his 2nd Amendment right to be armed.
It’s 3,000 not 30,000
30,000 movies is 4 Movies being created per day by Hollywood for 20 years, no, I think not, the number is 3,000 movies (even that was probably rounded up)
I bought a $450 Toshiba DVD player eleven years ago (got a free Titanic VHS with it). It's still running but won't play some discs. It is, however, fairly good about playing scratched discs if they are clean.
I bought a $40 Phillips from wally world a year and a half ago and it has no problems at all, and will play the relative few discs that won't in the other.
My 5 DVD Magnavox would not play DVD’s unless the were perfect. It was so frustrating but I could tell it had a lot to do with the laser being dirty. I tried one of those CD’s with the cleaning brushes. Still would not work,finally I took the the stupid thing apart and reached way in there and cleaned it by hand. Just like that it started working again. Unfortunate I have to repeat it about every three mouths. It will be my last Magnavox!
You get the best info on FR.
Those cheap DVD players are amazingly good at doing what the expensive ones will not, playing disks with normal wear and tear.
Do you actually use Netflix? Or are you just a wise guy?
I’ve watched over 300 movies from Netflix and only 1 had a quality problem.
Just imagine how big the fine would be if he downloaded them all!
Yes & yes...
It seems that almost EVERY dvd freezes, skips, etc. It's to the point now where my wife is ready to pull the plug on Netflix.
We had similar problems and then got into the habit of cleaning the discs with a cloth before we watch them. Problem seemed to go away.
I'm glad I'm not the only one having this problem. I bought "GoldenEye" from Walmart and it would freeze on the expensive DVD player, but my $90 portable and the computers play it fine. Go figure.
Tried that too, with limited success. You can see the scratches all over the disc itself.
He was probably stealing multiple copies of the same movie and selling the DVDs on Ebay for $2.
It didn’t say anything about 30000 unique movies.
Postal Ping
We bought a 27 dollar DVD player at Wallyworld. I think it is an APEX or something like that. Had it over a year and it works beautifully and plays every DVD we throw at it, including ones the kids have scratched up.
I've only ever had one go missing. It was sent from my home mailbox. Never had a problem dropping them in the box at the post office.
More than likely, that one is in the guy's jeep between the seat and the floor.
Try pulling the plug on your DVD player, first. Seriously, my $40 Phillips from Walmart has never not played a Netflix DVD, unless the DVD was actually broken.
Oh man. I once owned a samsung 5 disc DVD player. Worst piece of junk I ever owned.
That wasnt the first 5 disc DVD player that I owned. The first one (a brand name I cant remember) broke down on me after only a couple of months use. I took it to the store for repairs, but because they couldnt contact their repair center, they gave me the option of choosing a brand new DVD player off of their shelves. I chose the samsung. I took it home and right out of the box, brand spanking new....it wouldnt work!!!
"This disc cannot be played. Please check the disc". Of course, no matter what disc out of my entire DVD library I put in, I STILL got the same message. (YES, I checked the region codes of the DVDs to make sure they matched with the player)
I tried putting only one disc in the carousel and got nothing but the "disc cannot be played" message. I put in three dvds, I got the same message, I pressed "disc skip" a couple times on the remote, hallelujah...it finally played a movie!
My joy was short lived. For, after that movie was over, I pressed the disc skip button on the remote again in order to see the next movie. Again I got the "disc cannot be played" message. Thinking that maybe the DVD player was trying to "read" an empty spot in the carousel, I filled up the carousel with 5 discs in the hopes that at least one would play, but no go. This time around, it wouldnt play ANY of the discs on the carousel, including the one it had previously played for me! ("This disc cannot be played. Please check the disc", "This disc cannot be played. Please check the disc", "This disc cannot be played. Please check the disc").
I took the samsung back to the store the next day and insisted on a replacement. But they refused and would send it to their repair center (they were finally able to contact the repair center), and told me I had to wait 4-6 weeks to get it back. So I waited, got it back....and the damn thing worked for me for only about a few months before breaking down again. In frustration, I decided against taking it in for repairs again. Instead I went to get myself a generic no known brand name single disc DVD player/vhs player combo (cost: 60 bucks) and that lasted me about a year and a half before it broke down. At which point I bought another to replace that, same price, but different unknown brand name...that lasted for a couple of years. Now I'm on my third single DVD disc/vhs combo player. I'm happy to have a cheap costing DVD player that works for at least a year for me. No more samsungs for me.
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