It doesn't look like finding usefull alternative way of doing things. It looks more like stupid workaround to avoid collision with the low. I fail to see in what way could it be innovative and beneficial to the whole society. If "using a computer" or "using a database" can stand for a "method" you're talking about then you can just skip this word.
Looks like you were not the only person having trouble with Antec PSU. I had Antec True Blue 480W model. It died in around 1.5 year and the only good thing I can say about it is that it didn't burn any components. The most strange thing about it was that around 1 time on every 4 times I turned it on at the back fuses in my flat couldn't handle this short power draw. My PC is normally working all the time so it didn't affect me that much but it not something that should happen. I don't know if it was only problem of my unit or general problem of this model. Taking the initial price of 140EUR I felt more then a little disappointed.
Anyway, I miss some measurements in this review. Would be nice to see efficiency results under low and high load and power consumtion in idle mode.
I'm not a lawyer but I see some serious obstacles here. To sue the infamous USPTO you have to win the case first. Legal costs are covered by the looser so you get your money back. Then again there is no ground to sue USPTO. Apparently this system is more clever then it seems. But lets try from the other end. The other one who can sue the USPTO is the company that submitted the request for patent. Lets say you sue someone for infringing your patent and in result your patent is revoked, you have to cover legal costs and so on. On this basis you could try to sue USPTO for granting the patent to you. It's their responsibility to decide what is patentable and what is not. Unfortunatly suing companies are mostly not interested in undermining USPTO's position.
I can't say it's not a theft. Yes, you can call it this way. Yet, for me, theft in this case is similar to lie. Generally lying is bad. But there are lies that do harm and there are lies that do no harm. Same is here. Mostly people have some amount of money they can spend monthly for entertainment/culture etc. It's a fixed amount based on salary. The question is only how much they can get for this amount of money. The companies can't get more money from them no matter what. Therefore apart from moral point of view I can't see all these billions MPAA/RIAA claims to loose. No matter if someone has this illegal song or not makes no difference to company. I'm not addressing here any moral issues here but economical aspects of problem.
Most important thing is that new technology slowly makes big distributors obsolate. They keep fighting to survive and grow like every economical organism. Well, their work places depend on this. But look now: media cost is very low, equipment necessary for professional recording is pretty cheap, network offers almost free distribution. What is the added value of these companies? I think only advertisement and nothing more. They take a pretty big piece of whole cake for this. They can use position and money gathered in older times to keep monopoly. Yet from my point of view they are an extremely big group of people doing nothing usefull but taking money and increasing the final price of product. Yes, they are "big, evil, blood-sucking, money-grubbing corporations" and I don't care if they survive or go down. What I want is to buy directly from artist and sooner or later whole world will come to this point.
Absulutely not acceptable solution. You force me to buy DVD with every anime I want to see (maybe just once). Do you think I buy every movie I watch in the cinema? The whole problem with US and Europe distributors is in fact that from core anime fans point of view they are simple not needed and could simply cease to exist. Official translations are usually made different way because they are targeting other group of people (kids or parents looking for some stuff for kids). Distributors cut out every piece of japanise culture and replace it with some local stuff. Lets imagine they do it more friendly for anime freaks. But what for? Why would anyone pay for translation that is available for free thanks to free fansubing groups? Why would anyone pay the costs of distribution itself if cost-free distribution network is already here? I believe many fans of anime and manga would gladly pay some fee to japanese producers. But not a single cent for distributors because their added value is worth nothing. My suggestion is different - let's make a network where I pay 30-70USD fee monthly for a right to download and watch any anime I want. Producers can share money depending on popularity of downloads. We can make several products of this type, for example for 30USD you get access to all anime older then 2 years and for 70 you get them all. The idea might look strange at first and there is a lot of technical issues to solve but I think it's a good direction.
I can't say you're wrong but there is something more to be said. One very big problem lies outside of company. It's the customer himself. How customer chooses IT company? He's looking for the fastest and the cheapest offer. The result is pretty obvius - the companies (especially when financially under pressure) declare totally unrealistic times and costs. Only mass products for opened market are free from this shortcoming. Customer doesn't have the konowledge necessary to estimate the time and costs of the project. Once he has invested a lot of money he is eager to add some more to get the final product finished. Of course this is dishonest approach but this is very common. And again it's up to the leaders to decide: to let their company go down or to cheat like all others do. But from this perspective their choice doesn't look that simple anymore.
Surely small losses won't change anything in Microsoft patent policy. In final outcome this system works more for then against them. They have more resources, more lawyers and more experience in such games. What I can't understand is why do you consider an equal injustice to be better then partial justice. It's quite the opposite. Justice is not built in just one day. It takes time. At first it swallows only small criminals and as it gains gradually more confidence it reaches for the big ones. Well, it is unequal but I can't see any way around it.
Compromise is not a bad thing as long as you really do not forget your long term goals. History shows that it happens quite often. Now, how could we know which case it will be with Google? For now we can only wait and see. It can still turn out to be either good or bad. Anyway don't write it's easy to die. Many people in this world have died for a noble cause and many other that committed heavy sins doesn't seem to be burdened by this fact at all. If trading with China is good on long term run cannot be decided yet. Maybe some good parts of our culture can be exported there but the equal chance is that we will pick up some bad habits from there (like corruption). In China they have the biggest criminal syndicates in the world. This will be surely imported together with other goods.
Under perfect free market conditions you might be right. However the sad truth is that business is currently strongly integreted and in many critical branches monopolized. Most important, the integration process is proceeding quickly in last years. And for me the government monopoly is by far better then private monopoly. The private monopoly will drain money without any limits and don't count on any rules or mercy here. Moreover they will definitely not invest this money in your area unless competition comes. In case of infrastructure investments such "invasion" on monopolized area proves to be expensive since if it occurs your opponent can counterattack immediately and on his home turf he is at adventage. This also means the companies will fight only over most profitable areas where potential income is best and are not likely to attack any strongly defended area. Theoretically you can also get income from rural areas. But are interes rates good enough? Maybe it's better for company to put the spare money into quite different business then? Private monopoly never cares about customer since it is supposed to work for shareholders, not for customer. History proves that in many cases doing things through government investments was actually cheaper then doing it privately. For examples private railways investments in Great Britain were bigger then government's investments in Germany. Railways in Germany are cheaper and better actually. There are also areas where idea of competing doesn't fit at all. Take for example roads. Does it make any sense to build two parallel toll roads? Surely not. Where is the competition then? I see many flows in government investments but it doesn't make sense to go to an extreme and say that private is good and public is bad.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't look like finding usefull alternative way of doing things. It looks more like stupid workaround to avoid collision with the low. I fail to see in what way could it be innovative and beneficial to the whole society. If "using a computer" or "using a database" can stand for a "method" you're talking about then you can just skip this word.
They obviously get a cut of this revenue because it increases book sales. I fail to see why would they deserve a part of ad revenue.
Looks like you were not the only person having trouble with Antec PSU. I had Antec True Blue 480W model. It died in around 1.5 year and the only good thing I can say about it is that it didn't burn any components. The most strange thing about it was that around 1 time on every 4 times I turned it on at the back fuses in my flat couldn't handle this short power draw. My PC is normally working all the time so it didn't affect me that much but it not something that should happen. I don't know if it was only problem of my unit or general problem of this model. Taking the initial price of 140EUR I felt more then a little disappointed. Anyway, I miss some measurements in this review. Would be nice to see efficiency results under low and high load and power consumtion in idle mode.
I'm not a lawyer but I see some serious obstacles here. To sue the infamous USPTO you have to win the case first. Legal costs are covered by the looser so you get your money back. Then again there is no ground to sue USPTO. Apparently this system is more clever then it seems. But lets try from the other end. The other one who can sue the USPTO is the company that submitted the request for patent. Lets say you sue someone for infringing your patent and in result your patent is revoked, you have to cover legal costs and so on. On this basis you could try to sue USPTO for granting the patent to you. It's their responsibility to decide what is patentable and what is not. Unfortunatly suing companies are mostly not interested in undermining USPTO's position.
I can't say it's not a theft. Yes, you can call it this way. Yet, for me, theft in this case is similar to lie. Generally lying is bad. But there are lies that do harm and there are lies that do no harm. Same is here. Mostly people have some amount of money they can spend monthly for entertainment/culture etc. It's a fixed amount based on salary. The question is only how much they can get for this amount of money. The companies can't get more money from them no matter what. Therefore apart from moral point of view I can't see all these billions MPAA/RIAA claims to loose. No matter if someone has this illegal song or not makes no difference to company. I'm not addressing here any moral issues here but economical aspects of problem. Most important thing is that new technology slowly makes big distributors obsolate. They keep fighting to survive and grow like every economical organism. Well, their work places depend on this. But look now: media cost is very low, equipment necessary for professional recording is pretty cheap, network offers almost free distribution. What is the added value of these companies? I think only advertisement and nothing more. They take a pretty big piece of whole cake for this. They can use position and money gathered in older times to keep monopoly. Yet from my point of view they are an extremely big group of people doing nothing usefull but taking money and increasing the final price of product. Yes, they are "big, evil, blood-sucking, money-grubbing corporations" and I don't care if they survive or go down. What I want is to buy directly from artist and sooner or later whole world will come to this point.
Absulutely not acceptable solution. You force me to buy DVD with every anime I want to see (maybe just once). Do you think I buy every movie I watch in the cinema? The whole problem with US and Europe distributors is in fact that from core anime fans point of view they are simple not needed and could simply cease to exist. Official translations are usually made different way because they are targeting other group of people (kids or parents looking for some stuff for kids). Distributors cut out every piece of japanise culture and replace it with some local stuff. Lets imagine they do it more friendly for anime freaks. But what for? Why would anyone pay for translation that is available for free thanks to free fansubing groups? Why would anyone pay the costs of distribution itself if cost-free distribution network is already here? I believe many fans of anime and manga would gladly pay some fee to japanese producers. But not a single cent for distributors because their added value is worth nothing. My suggestion is different - let's make a network where I pay 30-70USD fee monthly for a right to download and watch any anime I want. Producers can share money depending on popularity of downloads. We can make several products of this type, for example for 30USD you get access to all anime older then 2 years and for 70 you get them all. The idea might look strange at first and there is a lot of technical issues to solve but I think it's a good direction.
I can't say you're wrong but there is something more to be said. One very big problem lies outside of company. It's the customer himself. How customer chooses IT company? He's looking for the fastest and the cheapest offer. The result is pretty obvius - the companies (especially when financially under pressure) declare totally unrealistic times and costs. Only mass products for opened market are free from this shortcoming. Customer doesn't have the konowledge necessary to estimate the time and costs of the project. Once he has invested a lot of money he is eager to add some more to get the final product finished. Of course this is dishonest approach but this is very common. And again it's up to the leaders to decide: to let their company go down or to cheat like all others do. But from this perspective their choice doesn't look that simple anymore.
Surely small losses won't change anything in Microsoft patent policy. In final outcome this system works more for then against them. They have more resources, more lawyers and more experience in such games. What I can't understand is why do you consider an equal injustice to be better then partial justice. It's quite the opposite. Justice is not built in just one day. It takes time. At first it swallows only small criminals and as it gains gradually more confidence it reaches for the big ones. Well, it is unequal but I can't see any way around it.
Compromise is not a bad thing as long as you really do not forget your long term goals. History shows that it happens quite often. Now, how could we know which case it will be with Google? For now we can only wait and see. It can still turn out to be either good or bad. Anyway don't write it's easy to die. Many people in this world have died for a noble cause and many other that committed heavy sins doesn't seem to be burdened by this fact at all. If trading with China is good on long term run cannot be decided yet. Maybe some good parts of our culture can be exported there but the equal chance is that we will pick up some bad habits from there (like corruption). In China they have the biggest criminal syndicates in the world. This will be surely imported together with other goods.
Under perfect free market conditions you might be right. However the sad truth is that business is currently strongly integreted and in many critical branches monopolized. Most important, the integration process is proceeding quickly in last years. And for me the government monopoly is by far better then private monopoly. The private monopoly will drain money without any limits and don't count on any rules or mercy here. Moreover they will definitely not invest this money in your area unless competition comes. In case of infrastructure investments such "invasion" on monopolized area proves to be expensive since if it occurs your opponent can counterattack immediately and on his home turf he is at adventage. This also means the companies will fight only over most profitable areas where potential income is best and are not likely to attack any strongly defended area. Theoretically you can also get income from rural areas. But are interes rates good enough? Maybe it's better for company to put the spare money into quite different business then? Private monopoly never cares about customer since it is supposed to work for shareholders, not for customer. History proves that in many cases doing things through government investments was actually cheaper then doing it privately. For examples private railways investments in Great Britain were bigger then government's investments in Germany. Railways in Germany are cheaper and better actually. There are also areas where idea of competing doesn't fit at all. Take for example roads. Does it make any sense to build two parallel toll roads? Surely not. Where is the competition then? I see many flows in government investments but it doesn't make sense to go to an extreme and say that private is good and public is bad.