I figured I would give some backing to my other comment; so from MS's website, a decent sized public university of 30,000 students, with licensing for all students, faculty and staff for the following:
Office Pro, Windows XP Pro, Front Page, VS.NET, Publisher, and OneNote (a modest package) would be $2,000,000.
$3 per month per student for Napster would be $1,000,000.
I don't think it'll be that difficult actually; it didn't take very long at all for Best Buy to modify their scanners to adapt to a host of different types of barcodes used for different things. For instance, all of the signs in the stores have a bar code which is actually the UPC + 1 digit sign style identifier + price; which allows employees to quickly scan the sign to verify if it displays the correct price.
People using older cash register systems might be SOL though.
You do realize that much of what you proposed is in the works for taking place? Things like that take time to implement, but it is happening slowly. To make changes happen at all, and to make them happen faster though; you need more money.
A good chunk of the patent office's revenue is sent to other places in the government. Very little of it stays with them. If they changed that, and made it so they got to keep most of that money, they could be a lot more efficient.
If it is a defective product being returned, I doubt they would refuse it. However, we're talking about people who rent items from retail stores and return them at 29 days and get their money back, only to buy the same item and do it again. These products are not defective and there is no right to return a non-defective product.
Which is why CC is probably not going to last much longer. They do it to attract customers and make them happy, but too many people that do that will buy nothing else so their plan backfires. (If they did that on a computer they probably just took a $100-200 hit.)
Wow, you get your information from Penn & Teller? It's simply not possible to feed the world without using new technology
The problem isn't a lack of food, it's politics. Enough food exists, but it doesn't get to where it needs to be. (Heck, we pay farmers NOT to grow crops).
So is their only option to completely remove themselves from society in order to prove their point? Everyone would just ignore them. It is necessary for organizations such as theirs to accept some amount of hypocrisy in order to exist at all.
It's sort of like how vegans can live with eating food which comes from fields which when harvested result in the deaths of thousands of rodents. It would be nearly impossible to exist without contributing to animal suffering in some form, but they what they can to reduce such suffering.
At least they are doing *something*, which is a lot better than sitting at home in front of your computer complaining about minor hypocricies in the grand scheme of things of which they are are trying to acheive.
I remember watching a lot of documentaries when I was younger about the "savages" that used to live in the Americas and how they were not even human by our standards.
All documentaries have some degree of editorialism to them, it just might be more subtle in some than others. It is impossible for a filmmaker to be completely objective in such circumstances.
Were he to have simply provided the video with no commentary or effects, it would probably still have a similar effect, since most people can draw conclusions on their own. It's sort of how Jon Stewart pokes fun at George Bush. He doesn't have to say a word. He'll show two video clips of him completely contradicting himself in two different instances. This is sort of like what Moore does.
His movie broke plenty of records, so I'm sure the box-office employees will be doing fine, they're paid hourly anyway, and unless people stop making movies, they'll have jobs.
The Louisville plant is a pretty new facility and operates a heck of a lot better than some of the older ones (like 81st street in Indy, yes, I've worked there.)
81st street hub in Indy is ran horribly. I've been in a trailer where there were two of us loading (and we were 2 of the fastest loaders in the building), and we still couldn't keep up with the flow and because of crappy equipment boxes kept getting jammed in the slides, etc. So after about an hour we had no way to get out of the trailer except to climb on boxes and step on them, or you would get a 70 pound box flying down the conveyer and run into something fragile that was stuck against every other box that had piled up.
Most of the UPS plants in the country are older and not at all like the one in Louisville. Keep in mind that it is more than likely your package will go through one of those plants on its way.
Oh, and if you send something 2nd day air it's not going on a plane unless it's travelling well over 1000 miles, so you might as well pay for ground. (From Indy we serviced all 2nd day air by truck from Iowa to Kansas to Florida to upstate New York.)
Gateway does have an in-store presence now; it's called 'e-machines'.
They were able to pass off all of the costs of operating the store to places like Best Buy. (e-machines desktops and laptops all have very minimal retail margin.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not anymore, they will just block that site too.
Considering that SCO doesn't have $31 million to give to their lawyers, probably no one will be getting much of anything out of this (unless SCO wins)
basically any name that doesn't have a specified color defaults to the regular green.
What do you call NCAs that everyone signs and have been held up quite often in court?
I figured I would give some backing to my other comment; so from MS's website, a decent sized public university of 30,000 students, with licensing for all students, faculty and staff for the following:
Office Pro, Windows XP Pro, Front Page, VS.NET, Publisher, and OneNote (a modest package) would be $2,000,000.
$3 per month per student for Napster would be $1,000,000.
You think a bulk MS license purchase is only a few hundred thousand?
I don't think it'll be that difficult actually; it didn't take very long at all for Best Buy to modify their scanners to adapt to a host of different types of barcodes used for different things. For instance, all of the signs in the stores have a bar code which is actually the UPC + 1 digit sign style identifier + price; which allows employees to quickly scan the sign to verify if it displays the correct price.
People using older cash register systems might be SOL though.
A better measure of performance than number of patents is the percentage of patents which withstood challenges in court during their lifetime.
The number of patents granted, large or small, tells you little about the quality of those patents.
You do realize that much of what you proposed is in the works for taking place? Things like that take time to implement, but it is happening slowly. To make changes happen at all, and to make them happen faster though; you need more money.
A good chunk of the patent office's revenue is sent to other places in the government. Very little of it stays with them. If they changed that, and made it so they got to keep most of that money, they could be a lot more efficient.
Most people consider it "less wrong" to steal a penny from a rich man, than a hundred dollars from a poor man.
The courts see little difference, except that the rich man can afford a better lawyer.
If it is a defective product being returned, I doubt they would refuse it. However, we're talking about people who rent items from retail stores and return them at 29 days and get their money back, only to buy the same item and do it again. These products are not defective and there is no right to return a non-defective product.
Read the return policy closely, they reserve the right to refuse to return any product without reason.
Which is why CC is probably not going to last much longer. They do it to attract customers and make them happy, but too many people that do that will buy nothing else so their plan backfires. (If they did that on a computer they probably just took a $100-200 hit.)
They buy items, file for rebates, and then return the item.
Most rebates actually require you to send in the actual UPC from the box, and most stores will not accept returns without the UPC on the box.
Sounds like mostly nitpicking to me; unless it really disrupts the flow of the movie or is so obvious that is distracting, it is irrelevant.
Wow, you get your information from Penn & Teller? It's simply not possible to feed the world without using new technology
The problem isn't a lack of food, it's politics. Enough food exists, but it doesn't get to where it needs to be. (Heck, we pay farmers NOT to grow crops).
So is their only option to completely remove themselves from society in order to prove their point? Everyone would just ignore them. It is necessary for organizations such as theirs to accept some amount of hypocrisy in order to exist at all.
It's sort of like how vegans can live with eating food which comes from fields which when harvested result in the deaths of thousands of rodents. It would be nearly impossible to exist without contributing to animal suffering in some form, but they what they can to reduce such suffering.
At least they are doing *something*, which is a lot better than sitting at home in front of your computer complaining about minor hypocricies in the grand scheme of things of which they are are trying to acheive.
I'd recommend Hauppage over ATI's AIW or Tv Wonder
Because most people will probably still go pay $7-9 to see it.
I remember watching a lot of documentaries when I was younger about the "savages" that used to live in the Americas and how they were not even human by our standards.
All documentaries have some degree of editorialism to them, it just might be more subtle in some than others. It is impossible for a filmmaker to be completely objective in such circumstances.
Were he to have simply provided the video with no commentary or effects, it would probably still have a similar effect, since most people can draw conclusions on their own. It's sort of how Jon Stewart pokes fun at George Bush. He doesn't have to say a word. He'll show two video clips of him completely contradicting himself in two different instances. This is sort of like what Moore does.
His movie broke plenty of records, so I'm sure the box-office employees will be doing fine, they're paid hourly anyway, and unless people stop making movies, they'll have jobs.
I thought the exact same thing; now I'm gonna be late for work, thanks for posting the link.
The Louisville plant is a pretty new facility and operates a heck of a lot better than some of the older ones (like 81st street in Indy, yes, I've worked there.)
81st street hub in Indy is ran horribly. I've been in a trailer where there were two of us loading (and we were 2 of the fastest loaders in the building), and we still couldn't keep up with the flow and because of crappy equipment boxes kept getting jammed in the slides, etc. So after about an hour we had no way to get out of the trailer except to climb on boxes and step on them, or you would get a 70 pound box flying down the conveyer and run into something fragile that was stuck against every other box that had piled up.
Most of the UPS plants in the country are older and not at all like the one in Louisville. Keep in mind that it is more than likely your package will go through one of those plants on its way.
Oh, and if you send something 2nd day air it's not going on a plane unless it's travelling well over 1000 miles, so you might as well pay for ground. (From Indy we serviced all 2nd day air by truck from Iowa to Kansas to Florida to upstate New York.)
=]
Gateway does have an in-store presence now; it's called 'e-machines'.
They were able to pass off all of the costs of operating the store to places like Best Buy. (e-machines desktops and laptops all have very minimal retail margin.)