One of the more puzzling things the last several years has been that when I do price comparisons for electronics goods between shop prices here in Norway and prices in online US-based stores, there is no real price-wise incentive to order from the states - even when you ignore shipping costs. It appears that there is - for some reason or another - an extreme amount of competition on electronics in Norway that keeps margins low and prices highly competitive internationally. And this in spite of costs associated with Norwegian consumer protection laws, employee protection laws etc. (Mind you, the same laws also tend to have beneficial side effects that _reduce_ the cost of doing business. What the net effect is I really have no idea.)
I haven't checked since the dollar started plummeting recently though - things may be different now.
Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day? Because better ideas enable you to make better products and having better products increases your competetiveness. By and large, the hard part is not to get an idea - the hard part is to turn it into a marketable product. By the time your product is in the market and your competitor can copy it, you are already looking at serious revenue before his copies become available. By that time, his product will still be inferior to yours which now incorporates yet another idea that he will need to spend time and money to copy. Your competitor is playing a never-ending game of catchup while you get the double benefit of the revenue from and the reputation for innovative products. If your company cannot find a way to capitalise on this advantage, then I suggest it is in need of new leadership. The only really interesting question wrt not having a patent regime is "how will we encourage inventors to tell us how they did it?"
If it is our society will collapse when we are no longer able to maintain what our parents built. If it turns out to be correct that our large brains are a result of social pressure, then a surprising conclusion would be that it's the Paris Hiltons of the world that are driving the evolution of human intelligence: It requires so much brain power to keep up with complicated social networks, ever-changing fashion trends, etc., that this field actually selects for highly effecient brains. This may be all the useful work these people do, but it definitely _is_ useful. They're humanity's brain cattle if you will. Then, each generation will see its share of social and genetic misfits. These people generally inherit the brain capacity of their more social-minded parents but use their brain capacity for technical pursuits rather than social, end up in tech jobs, and ensure that our machines keep working right:-)
(They skipped 3, 4 and 5 right?) If only it were that simple. Presumably, Java 1.5 and 1.6 (also known as Java5 and Java6) are still Java 2 products. The Java 2 terminology appears to have been deprecated, however, once it became clear the Microsoft would not be pushing the Java angle anymore. The "Java 2" term came into existence at about the time when Sun was having trouble with the Microsoft Java VM being deliberately incompatible (and in violation of contract). It appears to me that "Java 2" was the brand name Sun used to differentiate their own "real" Java from Microsoft's Java 1 VM. The "100% pure Java" effort was at about the same time. So JVMs continued being called "Java 2" systems throughout 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. I am not sure if it survived into 1.5 (aka 5) though. They may have discontinued it beforehand in order to avoid (further) confusion. Java 1.5 became Java5 because Sun engineers seem completely immune to bumping major versions and the marketing people feel that "upgrade from Java 1.5 to Java 1.6" seems less compelling than "upgrade from Java 5 to Java 6". So version-wise, Java skipped 2,3 and 4 (it went from 1.4 directly to 5.0), but system-wise(-ish) it went from 1 to 2 and then to nothing in particular since there's no pressing need to fight Microsoft on this particular battlefield anymore.
The only remotely practical way of doing PKI for the masses is to issue everyone a smartcard with their private key on it. The user doesn't know this private key (he uses a PIN to activate it), only the smartcard and the issuing authority do. And the card does all the encryption/decryption that is necessary so the key never leaves the card. The remaining problem would be to convince a sufficiently large number of people that they should accept having to carry and use a smartcard when needing to identify themselves. This might be difficult in the US, but somewhat easier in Europe. It follows, however, that when such a strong authentication system is in place, people who do manage to crack it will be that much better off than they are today. After all, few would question a positive smartcard-based id.
The people in Iraq and many other parts of the world are INTENTIONALLY targeting civilians as a means to an end. They want to get their message out and to terrorize the population.
Perhaps, but then again, any war is at best chaotic and difficult to get a grasp of for outsiders. Some Iraqi resistance groups might be total psychopaths along the lines we are being told, but others might be more along the lines of the stereotypical European Resistance movements in WW2. Most are probably somewhere in between. The only thing we can really be sure of is that many Western governments have a vested interest in portraying them all as baby eaters and so that's the sort of stories we are likely to see in our media. It is comparatively difficult for us to learn much beyond these superficial descriptions and so it is also difficult to maintain any kind of informed debate on the matter.
People who used terrorism agains nazi occupation in several european countries and to a certain extend some of the intifada fighters may claim that title as long as they only attacked military or police targets of a brutal occupation force dictatorship in their homeland. War is never that clear-cut. Norwegian freedom fighters sunk a civilian ferry (the Hydro), knowingly causing a number of civilian casualties, yet this is considered one of the greatest achievements of the Norwegian resistance during WW2 since the same ferry had multiple barrels of heavy water in its holds that were en route for Germany. The D-day landings and the ensuing campaign into France saw thousands upon thousands of French civilians getting blown to bits by allied bombers and yet this has since been considered a great and noble military campaign. Trying to win a war is rather akin to trying to make a really really big omelet that way...
It's a more attractive offer for some other big publisher who goes ut, buys a copy and starts printing millions of knock-offs. What's more they can even undercut the first publisher, because they don't have to amortise that big fat advance. Probably not. Producing a commercial-level product from an existing manuscript is a relatively costly process, especially considering that they'll likely have to transcribe the material and invest just as much into editorial quality assurance and so forth as the original publisher did. Furthermore, getting Rowling onboard would likely be more than worth her fees for the publicity benefits alone. Not least of all when considering the great many people will want to preorder the book from whoever can deliver it first, and that will be Rowling's chosen publisher.
Yay, back to the good old days where the only art produced was that that explicitly glorified the extremely wealthy! Luckily, we live in an age when the population at large is extremely wealthy. The only potential drawback to a modern public patronage system is that we'd generally only get the art that people want to have produced. I don't think this would be worth shedding any tears about.
So now what? Does she write book 2 knowing that if she publishes it she'll only sell a few hundred thousand copies before stores are swamped with the (now legal) copies from the major publisher? It's difficult to say what Rowling would do since I don't know her. However, two viable strategies are rather obvious. She could 1) Go with her old publisher and sell a couple of hundred thousand copies - which probably earns her enough to make it worth the bother, or 2) Go to the big publisher and say "I'll write book 2 for you if you'll give me $millions". In case 2, the big publisher is presumably in the publishing business to make money and this will be an attractive offer for them knowing that they will sell millions of copies.
Hows that always only women and children are considered some "war crimes", even if the number of slaughtered males vastly outnumbers them? It's probably biological. Children are important because we're hard-wired to want to protect children - it's probably a genetic imperative as much as anything. Women are important because they can give birth and so the ability of a population to recover from some great disaster is directly dependent upon the quantity of fertile women available. Men aren't that important because one single man can impregnate a large number of women while a woman is out for a year after each successful fertilization. Your only remaining problem is, of course, the food supply, but that can be handled adequately by both men and women (or the children I suppose).
I was under the impression that software patents were _not_ allowed on the whole of Europe. That is almost correct. In Europe, software _as such_ cannot be patented. And "as such" turn out to be two very important words in this context. Patent lawyers have been very creative in getting software patented as something that is not quite software "as such". The most popular approach seems to be to patent it as software "that runs on a computer", which may or may not be different from software "as such".
If I were to take a random guess, I would say it's written YYYY/MM/DD in the US because this was the most convenient format when IBM wanted to sort their hole cards. Of course, for all I know, the format may predate their efforts...
Either get one religion for every human being or thrash them all, then maybe juts maybe peace can be achieved. This has been an ongoing project for the last two thousand years or so. It doesn't seem to be helping much:-)
Are you actually suggesting that software companies should give out software for free to those that "can't afford it"? How is said company supposed to determine that?
This is very easy and doesn't involve the company at all. You have the government legalise copying and sharing. What will happen now is that people who can afford the software will buy it, because they will want to be able to pre-order it to have it on day one, they will want to have the original box it comes in and they will want to have access to whatever support the vendor is offering its paying customers. Everyone else, including those who cannot afford it and including those who really just don't want to fork out the money for it, will obtain it as an online copy one way or the other.
This is just another form of market segmentation, but a much cleaner one than what we see the vendors employing today (mail-in rebates, coupons, bargain bins, etc.) and one that has the added benefit of not criminalising 50% of the population.
You hit the nail on the head buddy. A long time ago I figured out that there are 2 kinds of people. Those that are willing to pay for software and those that aren't.
Back in the 80s, I used to pirate large amounts of games and other software. I also had one drawer and one shelf full of originals that I had bought. In your taxonomy, I may have been in group 1+2i?:-)
Nowadays, I buy my software. This is mostly because it's the most convenient way of obtaining it and because I decided to drop PC games when they started coming with built-in CD dongles rather than go heavy on the cd-dongle-elimination route (it became too inconvenient - games aren't that important to me).
After the first few rapists had their genitals cut/burned off by victims' families, bad people would get the idea. Or, more likely, it would be the start of a long and eventful blood feud. An observation which sheds some light on how "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" was most likely originally meant as a means by which to reduce punishment for crimes and prevent ever-escalating cycles of violence.
That is generally the case for most high-profile manufacturers. They give you a 1 or 2 year warranty (that by law has to be better than what the consumer law mandates or they're not allowed to call it a warranty at all) and the general practice is that they won't pester you about the hows or whats or whys so long as the item is demonstrably malfunctioning (I'm sure there are exceptions for obvious cases of abuse, serial returners etc). The 5-year period is, however, from date of purchase and not from the end of the manufacturer warranty (and for some items, it is only 2 years). As an additional point, if you have sent in an item for repairs of the same flaw three times and the flaw is still there, you are entitled to an entirely new product rather than a mere repair. As long as the malfunction is covered by the 2-or-5-year law.
I don't really see that fault or no fault needs to be very important considerations. Certainly, if we were to be freed of the concept of "free will", then fault or not will not matter. But I may be tainted by the legal system I have grown up under. It tends to emphasize prevention of future crime and rehabilitation and de-emphasize pure punishment and other revenge-like motives for sentencing people. In a mostly revenge-based justice system I can see that difficulties might arise.
If there is no free will...... then nobody can be held responsible for anything that happens. Of course they can. Without free will, people will be acting according to their natures and if their natures turn out to be objectionable (e.g. they are murderers) we will hold them responsible for being of a horrid nature and we will punish them. Until we can find a way to accurately measure someone's predetermined future, I expect we'd just keep on handling things the way we are doing now.
Does this scare anyone else? I mean, I'm not British but what kind of a precedent would this set for the rest of the world? It might be a good thing. At the moment, a number of politicians in my country are eagerly arguing for 1984-like legislation and they are pointing to the British police state as an example why this new legislation would be a good idea. The more extreme Britain gets, the more likely it would be that our politicans would see them for what they actually are and stop trying to import their horrid ideas into this country.
Most consumer electronics in Norway will have a manufacturer-warranty of 1-2 years on them that tend to act as no-questions-asked "get repairs for free" cards throughout the period. It is usually not problematic to get manufacturers to respect these warranties. Beyond this period, consumer laws say that some items have a 2-year period and others (a bit poorly specified as "items that are expected to last longer") a 5-year period (from date of purchase) in which the manufacturer is responsible for any production defects. Getting manufacturers to accept complaints according to this law can get a bit trickier. At the very least, you often have to actually put down in writing what your complaint is and I am sure some people find this difficult. These consumer laws will, of course, tend to increase the prices. We seem to be so rich, however, that we don't really care. In fact, retailers are making good profit from selling _even stronger_ insurance together with the gadgets (e.g. 3-year accident insurance etc.) so I doubt the consumer laws are holding us back any. (And price comparisons of my own vs various international webshops seem to indicate that consumer electronics are actually quite cheap in Norway - comparing intl. webshops to retail prices here I don't actually see any incentive to order from them, and that is _before_ considering customs charges.) My own experiences with this is one time when I sent in my Thinkpad after 2 years (IBM's warranty was 1 year only) and complained that the power socket had become loose. They fixed it without giving me any grief. The other time, my dish washer started acting up (incidentally, 1 day before the law-mandated 5-year period was up). I called the retailer's appointed repairmen, a guy showed up, fixed the thing, noted the date and matter-of-factly informed me that I wouldn't have to pay for it. But both of these were for products from high-profile, well respected companies. They tend to know the law and its practice well enough to not want to give their customers any grief over an issue that will eventually get ruled in the customer's favour anyway. If you purchase from less experienced/professional retailers, experiences may vary a lot. And if you've stumbled across one of the fly-by-night outfits you're probably better served just writing off your loss and moving on.
The thing is that the samba team has at one time said "yeah, sure you can use this, no problem" (I paraphrase). For them to then, a couple of years later, say "ah, no sorry, what we said earlier doesn't apply now, you can't use that anymore" is a particularly nasty variant of bait and switch that I doubt will go down well with the courts. I expect that, in a nutshell, once licensed you stay licensed.
I believe the PS3 eBayers buy a very limited number of PS3s to resell (typically one). I believe it is rather rare that one single person tries to buy a large number of them at the same time (to the extent that the store is emptied). As it stands, if eBay-reselling of PS3s at jacked up prices is, in fact, a viable way of making money then this can only be because selling PS3s on eBay is a superior or preferred way of trading in this commodity. The resellers are therefore doing the market a favour by offering a service that is desired but otherwise unavailable. What _should_ be happening in this case would be for established retailers to sell the things online but if they refuse to do so then they leave it to others to drive progress. I don't see that those who pick up the challenge should be chastised for this.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the more puzzling things the last several years has been that when I do price comparisons for electronics goods between shop prices here in Norway and prices in online US-based stores, there is no real price-wise incentive to order from the states - even when you ignore shipping costs. It appears that there is - for some reason or another - an extreme amount of competition on electronics in Norway that keeps margins low and prices highly competitive internationally. And this in spite of costs associated with Norwegian consumer protection laws, employee protection laws etc. (Mind you, the same laws also tend to have beneficial side effects that _reduce_ the cost of doing business. What the net effect is I really have no idea.)
I haven't checked since the dollar started plummeting recently though - things may be different now.
Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day?
Because better ideas enable you to make better products and having better products increases your competetiveness.
By and large, the hard part is not to get an idea - the hard part is to turn it into a marketable product. By the time your product is in the market and your competitor can copy it, you are already looking at serious revenue before his copies become available. By that time, his product will still be inferior to yours which now incorporates yet another idea that he will need to spend time and money to copy. Your competitor is playing a never-ending game of catchup while you get the double benefit of the revenue from and the reputation for innovative products. If your company cannot find a way to capitalise on this advantage, then I suggest it is in need of new leadership.
The only really interesting question wrt not having a patent regime is "how will we encourage inventors to tell us how they did it?"
If it is our society will collapse when we are no longer able to maintain what our parents built. :-)
If it turns out to be correct that our large brains are a result of social pressure, then a surprising conclusion would be that it's the Paris Hiltons of the world that are driving the evolution of human intelligence: It requires so much brain power to keep up with complicated social networks, ever-changing fashion trends, etc., that this field actually selects for highly effecient brains. This may be all the useful work these people do, but it definitely _is_ useful. They're humanity's brain cattle if you will.
Then, each generation will see its share of social and genetic misfits. These people generally inherit the brain capacity of their more social-minded parents but use their brain capacity for technical pursuits rather than social, end up in tech jobs, and ensure that our machines keep working right
(They skipped 3, 4 and 5 right?)
If only it were that simple. Presumably, Java 1.5 and 1.6 (also known as Java5 and Java6) are still Java 2 products. The Java 2 terminology appears to have been deprecated, however, once it became clear the Microsoft would not be pushing the Java angle anymore.
The "Java 2" term came into existence at about the time when Sun was having trouble with the Microsoft Java VM being deliberately incompatible (and in violation of contract). It appears to me that "Java 2" was the brand name Sun used to differentiate their own "real" Java from Microsoft's Java 1 VM. The "100% pure Java" effort was at about the same time.
So JVMs continued being called "Java 2" systems throughout 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. I am not sure if it survived into 1.5 (aka 5) though. They may have discontinued it beforehand in order to avoid (further) confusion.
Java 1.5 became Java5 because Sun engineers seem completely immune to bumping major versions and the marketing people feel that "upgrade from Java 1.5 to Java 1.6" seems less compelling than "upgrade from Java 5 to Java 6".
So version-wise, Java skipped 2,3 and 4 (it went from 1.4 directly to 5.0), but system-wise(-ish) it went from 1 to 2 and then to nothing in particular since there's no pressing need to fight Microsoft on this particular battlefield anymore.
The only remotely practical way of doing PKI for the masses is to issue everyone a smartcard with their private key on it. The user doesn't know this private key (he uses a PIN to activate it), only the smartcard and the issuing authority do. And the card does all the encryption/decryption that is necessary so the key never leaves the card.
The remaining problem would be to convince a sufficiently large number of people that they should accept having to carry and use a smartcard when needing to identify themselves. This might be difficult in the US, but somewhat easier in Europe.
It follows, however, that when such a strong authentication system is in place, people who do manage to crack it will be that much better off than they are today. After all, few would question a positive smartcard-based id.
The people in Iraq and many other parts of the world are INTENTIONALLY targeting civilians as a means to an end. They want to get their message out and to terrorize the population.
Perhaps, but then again, any war is at best chaotic and difficult to get a grasp of for outsiders. Some Iraqi resistance groups might be total psychopaths along the lines we are being told, but others might be more along the lines of the stereotypical European Resistance movements in WW2. Most are probably somewhere in between. The only thing we can really be sure of is that many Western governments have a vested interest in portraying them all as baby eaters and so that's the sort of stories we are likely to see in our media. It is comparatively difficult for us to learn much beyond these superficial descriptions and so it is also difficult to maintain any kind of informed debate on the matter.
People who used terrorism agains nazi occupation in several european countries and to a certain extend some of the intifada fighters may claim that title as long as they only attacked military or police targets of a brutal occupation force dictatorship in their homeland. ...
War is never that clear-cut.
Norwegian freedom fighters sunk a civilian ferry (the Hydro), knowingly causing a number of civilian casualties, yet this is considered one of the greatest achievements of the Norwegian resistance during WW2 since the same ferry had multiple barrels of heavy water in its holds that were en route for Germany. The D-day landings and the ensuing campaign into France saw thousands upon thousands of French civilians getting blown to bits by allied bombers and yet this has since been considered a great and noble military campaign.
Trying to win a war is rather akin to trying to make a really really big omelet that way
It's a more attractive offer for some other big publisher who goes ut, buys a copy and starts printing millions of knock-offs. What's more they can even undercut the first publisher, because they don't have to amortise that big fat advance.
Probably not. Producing a commercial-level product from an existing manuscript is a relatively costly process, especially considering that they'll likely have to transcribe the material and invest just as much into editorial quality assurance and so forth as the original publisher did. Furthermore, getting Rowling onboard would likely be more than worth her fees for the publicity benefits alone. Not least of all when considering the great many people will want to preorder the book from whoever can deliver it first, and that will be Rowling's chosen publisher.
Yay, back to the good old days where the only art produced was that that explicitly glorified the extremely wealthy!
Luckily, we live in an age when the population at large is extremely wealthy. The only potential drawback to a modern public patronage system is that we'd generally only get the art that people want to have produced. I don't think this would be worth shedding any tears about.
So now what? Does she write book 2 knowing that if she publishes it she'll only sell a few hundred thousand copies before stores are swamped with the (now legal) copies from the major publisher?
It's difficult to say what Rowling would do since I don't know her. However, two viable strategies are rather obvious. She could
1) Go with her old publisher and sell a couple of hundred thousand copies - which probably earns her enough to make it worth the bother, or
2) Go to the big publisher and say "I'll write book 2 for you if you'll give me $millions".
In case 2, the big publisher is presumably in the publishing business to make money and this will be an attractive offer for them knowing that they will sell millions of copies.
Hows that always only women and children are considered some "war crimes", even if the number of slaughtered males vastly outnumbers them?
It's probably biological. Children are important because we're hard-wired to want to protect children - it's probably a genetic imperative as much as anything. Women are important because they can give birth and so the ability of a population to recover from some great disaster is directly dependent upon the quantity of fertile women available. Men aren't that important because one single man can impregnate a large number of women while a woman is out for a year after each successful fertilization.
Your only remaining problem is, of course, the food supply, but that can be handled adequately by both men and women (or the children I suppose).
I was under the impression that software patents were _not_ allowed on the whole of Europe.
That is almost correct. In Europe, software _as such_ cannot be patented. And "as such" turn out to be two very important words in this context. Patent lawyers have been very creative in getting software patented as something that is not quite software "as such". The most popular approach seems to be to patent it as software "that runs on a computer", which may or may not be different from software "as such".
Taking stuff you haven't paid for is morally wrong.
Every time I take a breath of air, I am doing something immoral?
If I were to take a random guess, I would say it's written YYYY/MM/DD in the US because this was the most convenient format when IBM wanted to sort their hole cards. ...
Of course, for all I know, the format may predate their efforts
Either get one religion for every human being or thrash them all, :-)
then maybe juts maybe peace can be achieved.
This has been an ongoing project for the last two thousand years or so. It doesn't seem to be helping much
Are you actually suggesting that software companies should give out software for free to those that "can't afford it"? How is said company supposed to determine that?
This is very easy and doesn't involve the company at all. You have the government legalise copying and sharing. What will happen now is that people who can afford the software will buy it, because they will want to be able to pre-order it to have it on day one, they will want to have the original box it comes in and they will want to have access to whatever support the vendor is offering its paying customers. Everyone else, including those who cannot afford it and including those who really just don't want to fork out the money for it, will obtain it as an online copy one way or the other.
This is just another form of market segmentation, but a much cleaner one than what we see the vendors employing today (mail-in rebates, coupons, bargain bins, etc.) and one that has the added benefit of not criminalising 50% of the population.
You hit the nail on the head buddy. A long time ago I figured out that there are 2 kinds of people. Those that are willing to pay for software and those that aren't.
:-)
Back in the 80s, I used to pirate large amounts of games and other software. I also had one drawer and one shelf full of originals that I had bought. In your taxonomy, I may have been in group 1+2i?
Nowadays, I buy my software. This is mostly because it's the most convenient way of obtaining it and because I decided to drop PC games when they started coming with built-in CD dongles rather than go heavy on the cd-dongle-elimination route (it became too inconvenient - games aren't that important to me).
After the first few rapists had their genitals cut/burned off by victims' families, bad people would get the idea.
Or, more likely, it would be the start of a long and eventful blood feud. An observation which sheds some light on how "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" was most likely originally meant as a means by which to reduce punishment for crimes and prevent ever-escalating cycles of violence.
That is generally the case for most high-profile manufacturers. They give you a 1 or 2 year warranty (that by law has to be better than what the consumer law mandates or they're not allowed to call it a warranty at all) and the general practice is that they won't pester you about the hows or whats or whys so long as the item is demonstrably malfunctioning (I'm sure there are exceptions for obvious cases of abuse, serial returners etc).
The 5-year period is, however, from date of purchase and not from the end of the manufacturer warranty (and for some items, it is only 2 years). As an additional point, if you have sent in an item for repairs of the same flaw three times and the flaw is still there, you are entitled to an entirely new product rather than a mere repair. As long as the malfunction is covered by the 2-or-5-year law.
I don't really see that fault or no fault needs to be very important considerations. Certainly, if we were to be freed of the concept of "free will", then fault or not will not matter.
But I may be tainted by the legal system I have grown up under. It tends to emphasize prevention of future crime and rehabilitation and de-emphasize pure punishment and other revenge-like motives for sentencing people. In a mostly revenge-based justice system I can see that difficulties might arise.
If there is no free will... ... then nobody can be held responsible for anything that happens.
Of course they can. Without free will, people will be acting according to their natures and if their natures turn out to be objectionable (e.g. they are murderers) we will hold them responsible for being of a horrid nature and we will punish them.
Until we can find a way to accurately measure someone's predetermined future, I expect we'd just keep on handling things the way we are doing now.
Does this scare anyone else? I mean, I'm not British but what kind of a precedent would this set for the rest of the world?
It might be a good thing. At the moment, a number of politicians in my country are eagerly arguing for 1984-like legislation and they are pointing to the British police state as an example why this new legislation would be a good idea. The more extreme Britain gets, the more likely it would be that our politicans would see them for what they actually are and stop trying to import their horrid ideas into this country.
Most consumer electronics in Norway will have a manufacturer-warranty of 1-2 years on them that tend to act as no-questions-asked "get repairs for free" cards throughout the period. It is usually not problematic to get manufacturers to respect these warranties.
Beyond this period, consumer laws say that some items have a 2-year period and others (a bit poorly specified as "items that are expected to last longer") a 5-year period (from date of purchase) in which the manufacturer is responsible for any production defects. Getting manufacturers to accept complaints according to this law can get a bit trickier. At the very least, you often have to actually put down in writing what your complaint is and I am sure some people find this difficult.
These consumer laws will, of course, tend to increase the prices. We seem to be so rich, however, that we don't really care. In fact, retailers are making good profit from selling _even stronger_ insurance together with the gadgets (e.g. 3-year accident insurance etc.) so I doubt the consumer laws are holding us back any. (And price comparisons of my own vs various international webshops seem to indicate that consumer electronics are actually quite cheap in Norway - comparing intl. webshops to retail prices here I don't actually see any incentive to order from them, and that is _before_ considering customs charges.)
My own experiences with this is one time when I sent in my Thinkpad after 2 years (IBM's warranty was 1 year only) and complained that the power socket had become loose. They fixed it without giving me any grief. The other time, my dish washer started acting up (incidentally, 1 day before the law-mandated 5-year period was up). I called the retailer's appointed repairmen, a guy showed up, fixed the thing, noted the date and matter-of-factly informed me that I wouldn't have to pay for it.
But both of these were for products from high-profile, well respected companies. They tend to know the law and its practice well enough to not want to give their customers any grief over an issue that will eventually get ruled in the customer's favour anyway. If you purchase from less experienced/professional retailers, experiences may vary a lot. And if you've stumbled across one of the fly-by-night outfits you're probably better served just writing off your loss and moving on.
The thing is that the samba team has at one time said "yeah, sure you can use this, no problem" (I paraphrase). For them to then, a couple of years later, say "ah, no sorry, what we said earlier doesn't apply now, you can't use that anymore" is a particularly nasty variant of bait and switch that I doubt will go down well with the courts.
I expect that, in a nutshell, once licensed you stay licensed.
I believe the PS3 eBayers buy a very limited number of PS3s to resell (typically one). I believe it is rather rare that one single person tries to buy a large number of them at the same time (to the extent that the store is emptied).
As it stands, if eBay-reselling of PS3s at jacked up prices is, in fact, a viable way of making money then this can only be because selling PS3s on eBay is a superior or preferred way of trading in this commodity. The resellers are therefore doing the market a favour by offering a service that is desired but otherwise unavailable. What _should_ be happening in this case would be for established retailers to sell the things online but if they refuse to do so then they leave it to others to drive progress. I don't see that those who pick up the challenge should be chastised for this.