Well on the bright side, it's not really any more expensive than most textbooks... (at least here in Canada) My worst one was a $250 textbook the instructor insisted on the first day that would be absolutely essential for his class. He never once referenced it the entire semester. I was furious!
And the only way to make people care is to make it affect them directly. Hence the request to ban devices. If people can't get the latest iDevice, they WILL notice, and I can't think of a faster way to get patent reform. Unfortunately I also don't see the ban happening, at most Apple will be forced to issue some software patch removing the offending feature (similar to Samsung removing the local/web integration from their search feature) and the game will continue..
This sounds very much like an eye for an eye, this is very close to what happened with Samsung's search feature. Samsung was forced to remove the integration between local and web search to appease Apple's lawyers, now we see a suit on a similar level against Apple asking them to remove a feature from their devices. Seems very "eye for eye" to me.
What happened? Patent and Copyright laws happened. Ever since those laws first existed, some form of competition has always been by lawyer instead of by features. As the amount of money controlled by individual corporations has increased, it's only natural that the amount of legal wrangling has as well. Lawsuits are very expensive for the small guy, but in the scale of today's large corporations, they have a far better cost/benefit ration than real R&D which is never guaranteed to be good enough to outdo the guy in his garage.
Some relief could be achieved by rewriting IP laws to make them more reasonable (shorter terms, higher bar for protection, etc) but the only way to make people compete solely on merit instead of on lawsuits is a complete abolishment of IP laws.
Irrelevant. If it were Apple vs. Some Guy In His Garage Ltd. then you'd have something, but by the time you get in to the scale of company that you're talking about, the dollar figures just aren't relevant any more, you can only fit so many lawyers on to a case, and so much research work, etc. Once you exceed that, your extra money just doesn't help anymore. And it's hard to say that Google/Motorola aren't big enough to reach that limit.
Well that would at least help to counteract the patch that samsung was forced to release by apple removing the integration between local and web search features... Companies need to make it clear to Apple that their lawsuit spree is not consequence free.
But is there any other likely way to get it changed then to bring it to the spotlight by making as big a disaster out of it as possible? If this suit were successful as initiated I can almost guarantee that patent law would be reformed quite quickly. Unfortunately I can also almost guarantee that the suit will result in, at most, apple re-writing some lines of code and the battle continuing onward.
Problem is that lawsuits move at a snail's pace compared to technology. All that is ever banned is models that are close to obsolete anyway, so it doesn't make a huge difference. They may get an injunction against the iphone5 about the time the iphone6 comes out, so even if the iphone6 has the exact same patent infringement happening it will require another legal round where the 6 gets banned when the 7 comes out.... and on, and on... the end result is that while billions of dollars are lost to the whole mess, the courts are tied up and unable to handle useful matters, and innovation is completely stifled when new entrants to the market are too scared to even bother... But the end consumer never notices so there is never the appropriate outrage among the general public that would be needed for any real patent reform.
how about completely ignoring what a person is doing, and only punish them if they are driving recklessly, regardless of the cause. We have laws against reckless driving already. don't make up new ones for each thing a person could possibly imagine doing. You'll never get every possible stupid act in a list anyway, and you will punish people who are actually being safe. I now live in a place where it's illegal to glance at the screen of your cell phone while stopped with the gear selector in park waiting for a 15 minute train to go by, and yet driving 20 under the limit in the fast lane on the expressway is perfectly fine. more laws isn't the answer, enforce the ones we already have instead.
I also wonder how long before we get stuck in a situation where cars drive themselves, but the person sitting in the driver's seat isn't allowed to do anything while there because of outdated laws that rarely if ever get taken off the books.
The "monkeying around" that I have had to do so far on linux was to insert the ubuntu install cd, and click continue a few times. All drivers were found and loaded automatically, no hunting around for CDs or searching the web for drivers like I've always had to do for Windows.
It gets worse. many vehicles that are almost identical in Canada and the US mysteriously appear as ineligible for import "impossible to comply to safety standards" or some have a requirement that only the dealership be allowed to upgrade it to Canadian standards (and then they refuse to do so) And who makes these rules you ask? surely it's some government safety watchdog, right? nope, The manufacturers themselves get to decide which of their models can or can not be made to meet Canadian standards, And they get to decide exactly what needs to be done, and can even restrict who is allowed to do it.
Of course that's still better than trying to import a vehicle from the rest of the world, in which case the government doesn't even care about the safety standards, you simply can't import it unless it is at least 15 years old. There have been cases of vehicles sold originally at dealerships in Canada, being exported, and then being denied re-entry in to Canada because they aren't 15 years old yet. The auto industry in Canada has a very effective lobby.
Tax on a car in Canada is 5% sales tax. and the prices listed don't include that. We're talking MSRP. the excuses given cover the gamut from "shipping costs" (which as I just pointed out make no sense whatsoever) to "redesigning the car for a smaller Canadian market" (how hard is it to put a speedometer with KM on the car? (I know there are technically other differences too, but not to the price they charge, and being that I can import a car from the USA, pay duty and the tax at the border (plus an air conditioning fee) make all the changes to bring the car up to Canadian standards myself, and still come out $10,000 or more cheaper tells me that it's just plain price gouging.)
One spelling mistake in the post (accidentally adding a second "c" to across.) Hardly an example of the worst spelling on Slashdot. (I suppose I also missed capitalizing the first letter of a few country names, but that's not technically "spelling.")
You are also forgetting that not only are those ebooks have price differances than the US, but also that they are just as expensive or more so than normal books, and have DRM in them to limit how you can even use them. It baffles me how people can just go along with that. Anyway its a big issue with many sides...
Oh I'm not forgetting anything, I am well aware of the multiple different ways the companies are choosing to screw us over. We need fewer corporate protection laws, and more consumer protection ones. I should be able to shop around and buy from whoever wants to sell me the best product at the best price, and the corporations should not be allowed to artificially restrict what I can do with it once I've bought it. Unfortunately the current legal system is exactly the reverse.
Did I say the other parties were saints?? I hate all of them, that doesnt' make the green's policy palatable. I'm libertarian leaning, unfortunately all our parties are socialist, but the greens far more so than any of the others.
Fiscally conservative???? where on earth did you get that garbage from? their platform involved higher taxes on anything that could in some way be related to the environment (any fuel, electricity, etc), higher taxes on any food deemed not to be good for you, and higher spending on every single department of the government (with the possible exception of the military). They had no provision to reduce spending on anything, no provision to reduce deficit or debt and many many many places where they wanted to spend more money.
I don't know why you think I'm a corporate shill, I don't think corporations should have any influence in politics either. I just want to be able to run my own life instead of having the government tell me what I can and can't buy, what I can and can't eat, etc. I want the government to get completely out of the world of blocking imports to protect local industry. I want them to abolish all IP laws (far more harm than good) I'm all for protecting the environment, but give realistic solutions. don't tell us what we can't do, tell us what we CAN.
If the green party weren't so socialist, even the NDP are significantly more conservative than the greens, I would vote for them because I like the idea of the outsider party getting support. I just can't stomach their nanny-state politics.
books get even more ridiculous once the internet is brought in to the picture. A friend of mine recently discovered that books for his ereader were double the price in Canada as in the US, from the same website (but as long as your credit card is canadian you can't get the american price). You want to claim shipping costs on an ebook that you download from the website?????
I've given up. when I buy anything that I don't need to touch first (like clothing I need to try on), or that can't go bad in transit (like food), I buy online. I can buy small electronics from hong kong with shipping for cheaper than it would cost me to mail them accross town and significantly cheaper than any store. I bought my latest bike accessories from isreal, with shipping still half the price of the local stores, I bought my last car from Japan, headache due to protectionist import rules, but a better vehicle than you can find around here and for much much cheaper.
I hear people screaming "buy local" but I refuse to pay double just because the store is local. My paycheque has to compete on the world stage, so do the people selling the products I want to buy. Of course there's a lot of pressure to make "free trade" agreements that prevent individuals from buying out of their own country, while still making sure corporations can source anything they want, anywhere they want.
You think that's bad... try being in Canada, our drug prices may be less, but our prices on almost everything else are significantly higher than in the USA. There was actually a news article here a while back about cars that were built at a plant in Canada, being $10,000-$20,000 cheaper in hawaii than they were at the dealership accross the street from the plant. I frequently buy other things online to avoid the ridiculous markup in Canadian stores too.
Funny, my experience with modern linux distributions has been that they "just work" unlike windows. Every time I sit down in front of a new windows install I get frustrated by the lack of codec support, or the lack of included DVD software, or the fact that each individual piece of software has a completely seperate and unrelated updater cluttering up the system tray, or a myriad of other issues. In contrast, on linux, I boot up, and it just works, any file I throw at it it opens, all the software is kept up to date by one package management system, new software is easy to find and install, and it just runs smooth and fast. OSX mostly seems to work too, though I do find my fiance's mac is much more tempermental on some things than my linux machine, it often looses track of our network storage device and needs a re-boot, it has frequent trouble with more obscure codecs and file formats, but it's certainly miles ahead of windows, even if it hasn't caught up to Ubuntu yet.
The small brands generally include windows too. and very few will remove it from the price if asked. I did state that there are some places that sell windows free machines. But usually a very limited selection of specs, and often at higher prices (due to lack of volume) building your own has usually been a way to keep prices down, while getting your ideal machine, and not paying for the windows license you don't want or need.
I expected the greens to be in favour of lots of regulation on environmental issues, however I discovered in their last election platform that they were also in favour of lots of regulation on EVERY aspect of life. Canada as a whole is far more "left" than the most liberal of the american parties, but the Green party makes even our most liberal political party look libertarian.
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Well on the bright side, it's not really any more expensive than most textbooks... (at least here in Canada)
My worst one was a $250 textbook the instructor insisted on the first day that would be absolutely essential for his class. He never once referenced it the entire semester. I was furious!
And the only way to make people care is to make it affect them directly. Hence the request to ban devices. If people can't get the latest iDevice, they WILL notice, and I can't think of a faster way to get patent reform.
Unfortunately I also don't see the ban happening, at most Apple will be forced to issue some software patch removing the offending feature (similar to Samsung removing the local/web integration from their search feature) and the game will continue..
This sounds very much like an eye for an eye, this is very close to what happened with Samsung's search feature. Samsung was forced to remove the integration between local and web search to appease Apple's lawyers, now we see a suit on a similar level against Apple asking them to remove a feature from their devices.
Seems very "eye for eye" to me.
What happened? Patent and Copyright laws happened. Ever since those laws first existed, some form of competition has always been by lawyer instead of by features. As the amount of money controlled by individual corporations has increased, it's only natural that the amount of legal wrangling has as well. Lawsuits are very expensive for the small guy, but in the scale of today's large corporations, they have a far better cost/benefit ration than real R&D which is never guaranteed to be good enough to outdo the guy in his garage.
Some relief could be achieved by rewriting IP laws to make them more reasonable (shorter terms, higher bar for protection, etc) but the only way to make people compete solely on merit instead of on lawsuits is a complete abolishment of IP laws.
Irrelevant. If it were Apple vs. Some Guy In His Garage Ltd. then you'd have something, but by the time you get in to the scale of company that you're talking about, the dollar figures just aren't relevant any more, you can only fit so many lawyers on to a case, and so much research work, etc. Once you exceed that, your extra money just doesn't help anymore. And it's hard to say that Google/Motorola aren't big enough to reach that limit.
Well that would at least help to counteract the patch that samsung was forced to release by apple removing the integration between local and web search features... Companies need to make it clear to Apple that their lawsuit spree is not consequence free.
But is there any other likely way to get it changed then to bring it to the spotlight by making as big a disaster out of it as possible?
If this suit were successful as initiated I can almost guarantee that patent law would be reformed quite quickly. Unfortunately I can also almost guarantee that the suit will result in, at most, apple re-writing some lines of code and the battle continuing onward.
Problem is that lawsuits move at a snail's pace compared to technology. All that is ever banned is models that are close to obsolete anyway, so it doesn't make a huge difference. They may get an injunction against the iphone5 about the time the iphone6 comes out, so even if the iphone6 has the exact same patent infringement happening it will require another legal round where the 6 gets banned when the 7 comes out.... and on, and on... the end result is that while billions of dollars are lost to the whole mess, the courts are tied up and unable to handle useful matters, and innovation is completely stifled when new entrants to the market are too scared to even bother... But the end consumer never notices so there is never the appropriate outrage among the general public that would be needed for any real patent reform.
how about completely ignoring what a person is doing, and only punish them if they are driving recklessly, regardless of the cause. We have laws against reckless driving already. don't make up new ones for each thing a person could possibly imagine doing. You'll never get every possible stupid act in a list anyway, and you will punish people who are actually being safe. I now live in a place where it's illegal to glance at the screen of your cell phone while stopped with the gear selector in park waiting for a 15 minute train to go by, and yet driving 20 under the limit in the fast lane on the expressway is perfectly fine. more laws isn't the answer, enforce the ones we already have instead.
I also wonder how long before we get stuck in a situation where cars drive themselves, but the person sitting in the driver's seat isn't allowed to do anything while there because of outdated laws that rarely if ever get taken off the books.
The "monkeying around" that I have had to do so far on linux was to insert the ubuntu install cd, and click continue a few times. All drivers were found and loaded automatically, no hunting around for CDs or searching the web for drivers like I've always had to do for Windows.
It gets worse. many vehicles that are almost identical in Canada and the US mysteriously appear as ineligible for import "impossible to comply to safety standards" or some have a requirement that only the dealership be allowed to upgrade it to Canadian standards (and then they refuse to do so)
And who makes these rules you ask? surely it's some government safety watchdog, right? nope, The manufacturers themselves get to decide which of their models can or can not be made to meet Canadian standards, And they get to decide exactly what needs to be done, and can even restrict who is allowed to do it.
Of course that's still better than trying to import a vehicle from the rest of the world, in which case the government doesn't even care about the safety standards, you simply can't import it unless it is at least 15 years old. There have been cases of vehicles sold originally at dealerships in Canada, being exported, and then being denied re-entry in to Canada because they aren't 15 years old yet. The auto industry in Canada has a very effective lobby.
Tax on a car in Canada is 5% sales tax. and the prices listed don't include that. We're talking MSRP. the excuses given cover the gamut from "shipping costs" (which as I just pointed out make no sense whatsoever) to "redesigning the car for a smaller Canadian market" (how hard is it to put a speedometer with KM on the car? (I know there are technically other differences too, but not to the price they charge, and being that I can import a car from the USA, pay duty and the tax at the border (plus an air conditioning fee) make all the changes to bring the car up to Canadian standards myself, and still come out $10,000 or more cheaper tells me that it's just plain price gouging.)
One spelling mistake in the post (accidentally adding a second "c" to across.) Hardly an example of the worst spelling on Slashdot. (I suppose I also missed capitalizing the first letter of a few country names, but that's not technically "spelling.")
If money is free speech, then so is code.
your code is only speech if your money speaks loudly enough...
And most normal people would love to break $100k...
You are also forgetting that not only are those ebooks have price differances than the US, but also that they are just as expensive or more so than normal books, and have DRM in them to limit how you can even use them. It baffles me how people can just go along with that. Anyway its a big issue with many sides...
Oh I'm not forgetting anything, I am well aware of the multiple different ways the companies are choosing to screw us over. We need fewer corporate protection laws, and more consumer protection ones. I should be able to shop around and buy from whoever wants to sell me the best product at the best price, and the corporations should not be allowed to artificially restrict what I can do with it once I've bought it. Unfortunately the current legal system is exactly the reverse.
Did I say the other parties were saints?? I hate all of them, that doesnt' make the green's policy palatable.
I'm libertarian leaning, unfortunately all our parties are socialist, but the greens far more so than any of the others.
Fiscally conservative???? where on earth did you get that garbage from? their platform involved higher taxes on anything that could in some way be related to the environment (any fuel, electricity, etc), higher taxes on any food deemed not to be good for you, and higher spending on every single department of the government (with the possible exception of the military). They had no provision to reduce spending on anything, no provision to reduce deficit or debt and many many many places where they wanted to spend more money.
I don't know why you think I'm a corporate shill, I don't think corporations should have any influence in politics either. I just want to be able to run my own life instead of having the government tell me what I can and can't buy, what I can and can't eat, etc. I want the government to get completely out of the world of blocking imports to protect local industry. I want them to abolish all IP laws (far more harm than good) I'm all for protecting the environment, but give realistic solutions. don't tell us what we can't do, tell us what we CAN.
If the green party weren't so socialist, even the NDP are significantly more conservative than the greens, I would vote for them because I like the idea of the outsider party getting support. I just can't stomach their nanny-state politics.
books get even more ridiculous once the internet is brought in to the picture. A friend of mine recently discovered that books for his ereader were double the price in Canada as in the US, from the same website (but as long as your credit card is canadian you can't get the american price). You want to claim shipping costs on an ebook that you download from the website?????
I've given up. when I buy anything that I don't need to touch first (like clothing I need to try on), or that can't go bad in transit (like food), I buy online. I can buy small electronics from hong kong with shipping for cheaper than it would cost me to mail them accross town and significantly cheaper than any store. I bought my latest bike accessories from isreal, with shipping still half the price of the local stores, I bought my last car from Japan, headache due to protectionist import rules, but a better vehicle than you can find around here and for much much cheaper.
I hear people screaming "buy local" but I refuse to pay double just because the store is local. My paycheque has to compete on the world stage, so do the people selling the products I want to buy. Of course there's a lot of pressure to make "free trade" agreements that prevent individuals from buying out of their own country, while still making sure corporations can source anything they want, anywhere they want.
You think that's bad... try being in Canada, our drug prices may be less, but our prices on almost everything else are significantly higher than in the USA. There was actually a news article here a while back about cars that were built at a plant in Canada, being $10,000-$20,000 cheaper in hawaii than they were at the dealership accross the street from the plant. I frequently buy other things online to avoid the ridiculous markup in Canadian stores too.
Funny, my experience with modern linux distributions has been that they "just work" unlike windows. Every time I sit down in front of a new windows install I get frustrated by the lack of codec support, or the lack of included DVD software, or the fact that each individual piece of software has a completely seperate and unrelated updater cluttering up the system tray, or a myriad of other issues. In contrast, on linux, I boot up, and it just works, any file I throw at it it opens, all the software is kept up to date by one package management system, new software is easy to find and install, and it just runs smooth and fast.
OSX mostly seems to work too, though I do find my fiance's mac is much more tempermental on some things than my linux machine, it often looses track of our network storage device and needs a re-boot, it has frequent trouble with more obscure codecs and file formats, but it's certainly miles ahead of windows, even if it hasn't caught up to Ubuntu yet.
And we libertarians aren't going to shoot them.
I didn't say that socialism was bad, only that I wouldn't vote for it.
The small brands generally include windows too. and very few will remove it from the price if asked.
I did state that there are some places that sell windows free machines. But usually a very limited selection of specs, and often at higher prices (due to lack of volume)
building your own has usually been a way to keep prices down, while getting your ideal machine, and not paying for the windows license you don't want or need.
The vast majority of computer users also buy their machines pre-built. so that doesn't negate the idea of building a machine to avoid windows
I expected the greens to be in favour of lots of regulation on environmental issues, however I discovered in their last election platform that they were also in favour of lots of regulation on EVERY aspect of life. Canada as a whole is far more "left" than the most liberal of the american parties, but the Green party makes even our most liberal political party look libertarian.