Security Essentials even seems to be more effective than AVG

You know what - I would because it would cut down on the crazy medical malpractices awards and maybe, just maybe, make healthcare affordable.

The civil courts are NOT a venue for the rich to abuse the poor, but they are a venue for the well lawyered to abuse whomever they want.

Witness the raft of personal injury, product liability, workplace discrimination, ADA compliance, and bankruptcy cases. In every one of those cases the plaintiff is usually poorer than whom they are suing, BUT their law firm is not. Now granted that every one of those cases needs something however small to get started, but most reasonable people would agree that quite often the "damages" awarded are not at all in proportion to what was suffered. Now this goes both ways, there are tons of people who have been discriminated against or injured or whatever, who haven't gotten their due because they didn't retain the best lawyer. Nothing to do with money, because the lawyer just gets a cut of the reward, nothing from the plaintiff upfront.

From an interview on television the homeowner didn't pay the fee LAST YEAR or this year. He offered to pay the $75 once the fire started

You can, but you have to know what to say - in this case the purchased software actually did what it was supposed to do. The pcs were functional again.

Visa/Mastercard are the cartel bosses, but the credit card processing is being done by ISOs such as First Data, RBS Lynk, etc. Anyone with 20 grand or so can get registered as a merchant processor and start trying to sell merchant processing. Depending on how big a portfolio of business you write, you can get better rates from the credit card networks. Then you can go out and sell a "cost plus" deal that is alledgedly tied to interchange fees. But you can hide a percent in obtuse statements and a couple of points here and there. Then you are making an easy percent just for the privelege of connecting a merchant with a credit card network Credit Card processing actually makes the rogue antivirus software business look ethical.

If the company closes up shop and disappears then their credit card processor "eats" the chargebacks. But they also grab all the so called "legit" charges. The processor is also getting a much larger percent transaction fee, supposedly to cover the higher chance of fraud for online transactions. So if the company actually skips town the processor is the one that grabs any other transactions to pay off the chargebacks and keeps the rest of the money themselves.

Credit card processing is a dirty dirty business

Well they were strippers, just clothed strippers, they happened to be absolutely naked (underneath their clothes), and nothing in the shrink wrap eula that covered the entrance to the champagne room said anything about them actually letting you see them naked without clothes.

The chargeback rules haven't caught up with technology. The thinkpad was a tangible piece of merchandise. The credit card processors know how to deal with that, i.e. bought x and x doesn't do what x is supposed to do, and as you said wasn't bought "as is". But what if you pay for a piece of software that only claims to restore your original home page and let you search AOL again. These people bought something that did that. How do you explain to your cc company that you clicked a link you shouldn't have and then you bought this software to fix the pc and it did fix it, but that you were scammed, because the original link was misleading.

As for warranties as I recall most software requires that you sign away just about any rights before you are allowed to use it. It is a slippery slope, try charging back MS Office because it is "broken" because you can't make pivot tables.

Depends on what they actually promised, they did "clean" the pcs of the browser hijacker. Even then just try suing a company from Russia in your local small claims court. Now this isn't ethical, but that doesn't mean it is not legal.

But the bogus product did "fix" the pcs. Now if their browser was still hijacked after paying the money it would be fraud, but here they got their pcs fixed for $80.

The rogue antivirus "appears" to be defrauding the customer. This is hair splitting, but it is important. Imagine this scenario, click a link for our super duper antivirus cleaner, customer clicks link, doesn't read fine print that says this is for novelty purposes, that it will change your homepage to goatse, that it will redirect all searches to images of kittens, or whatever. The super duper antivirus cleaner says the pc is infected. The customers pc is now "broken" because their home page shows a gaping ass, and every time they try and use yahoo search they get kittens. They see a link to give their credit card to clean their pc. They cough up $80 and their pc is fixed.

Now is that fraud?