Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26124 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
In the US you are allowed to advertise fairs not including "government fees/taxes" - in the Eu you are supposed to advertise the full fair.
One major US airline got sent to the naughty step for including the cost of the crew in the fees/taxes because the government set the number of crew required.
Ryanair famously sued other flight price comparison sites - claiming that Ryanair's prices were copyright.
The other sites also tended to show the real price, including the booking/credit card fees and the 50quid breathing-on-board surcharge
The joy of Dell - as opposed to HP/IBM - you checked out the specs on the website, ordered the machine on the website, it arrived.
Then we got a bit bigger and we got a sales number to call in Ireland. If you missed the deadline on a deal, or you wanted a slightly different config they would 'help you out'
Then we got big enough to be a "preferred customer" and had to deal with Dell salesdroids.
If you wanted a machine you had to call your particular salesman and leave a message, hoping he would get back to you to "discuss a quote". The quote was always more than the web price and then when you finally ordered the machine and got the invoice they had always added a few extras like MS-Office or a printer.
Dell - when your preferred customers are ordering stuff on your website with their personal credit cards to avoid dealing with your sales team - it's time for a rethink
Atom chips are quite capable of driving larger screens and addressing more memory.
Microsoft limited the specs for the starter edition of windows - put in a larger screen or more memory and you could pay for a full copy of Windows7, which would then require more memory etc.
I suspect this little bit of strategy is going to come back and bite them. Little companies like Intel and Samsung learnt that Microsoft was capable of dictating their product lines in a way they hadn't done before. I imagine a lot of the Samsung interest in Chromebooks/Android etc and comes from not wanting to be owned by Redmond.
Because most people don't want a computer - they want a web browser, netflix/youtube viewer/, typewriter.
You know everytime you visit your parents/grandparents/non-techie freinds and you daren't touch their computer because of all the extra toolbars, popups, trojans, god-knows-whats on their machine?
And you spent all boxing day fixing it for them? With a chromebook they don't have any of that, if they do have a problem they press a reset key, log back into Google and they have their machine back.
Partly it was Sinclair NIH and need to show that they were innovating .
But a big problem for Sinclair seems to have been negotiating parts, a normal manufacturer assumes that the price he is quoted for a one-off unit now will drop over the year it takes to design the machine and then will fall with ordering bulk.
Sinclair always seems to have taken the cost of a component and decided it would be cheaper to design their own alternative.
So what happens when the same thing applies to Amazon?
A movie studio or a Murdoch owned publisher can afford to threaten to go after anyone who pans their DVD or book.
And since Amazon has your credit card it's not a big leap for the court to order Amazon to collect the judgement against you. If the MPAA are involved they probably don't even bother going to court.
No - they should act now before the next news story pushes them off the front page.
If we were able to draft such a complex legislative framework as the banning of dangerous dogs without any subsequent embarrassing loopholes/side effects/misinterpretation why shouldn't we be able to reform such a trivial subject as Patent law with a quick knee-jerk sound byte, ?
>The UK has no defence vision nor strategy, either.
I thought it was to do whatever our masters told us?
So long as we have enough unemployed yoofs to use as cannon fodder in order to show that it is "an international coalition of liberators" (and not an American invasion) we don't need to actually equip them
So you want to reduce the TV to a commodity product competing for who can ship the barest chinese LCD panel to you for the lowest cost?
While Sony, Panasonic, Apple etc would all like to add every conceivable value added smart feature they can think of to differentiate their product and justify their margin
Two problems with loser pays.
Small Patent Trolls can simply spin off a no-asset shell company for each lawsuit to own the patent and be bankrupt if they lose.
Massive Patent Trolls (Apple,IBM,MSFT) can simply increase their own legal costs artificially to the point where you (or your shareholders/investors) can't risk losing and so have to settle.
>Of course, the USPTO and other patent offices do search for prior art
It recently changed but the USPTO used to ONLY count prior art in filled US patents - although patents could be overturned in court for any prior art.
There was a notorious case of a US drug company patenting tumeric as an antisceptic. It has been known for 1000s of years and written down in 2500 year old Hindu works - but the Mahabarat's authors forgot to file with USPTO.
For most defamation cases there wouldn't be much point after a year.
If I want to say something nasty about the latest pop-idol-big-brother-loser then a year later nobody is going to give a damn.
It would take a particularly deliberate attack to say something about a public figure in the Arbroath Anglers Almanac just so you can repeat it in the Sun a year later. It would also give the victim a good claim that it was done maliciously.
>Wow, now there's a novel idea, charging the public for the use of a public facility at cost.
It was partly introduced because public bodies eg University of California were using it to stop groups they didn't like. Controversial figure wants to speak to students ?- Ok we have free speech - but the extra security will be < dr evil > one million dollars
I'm not even joking. Ca introduced a 100% tax write off for "work vehicles" which meant everyone in the state suddenly became a tupperware/avon agent and the taxpayer paid for a new BMW.
So the IRS introduced a minimum weight, so only work trucks would count, and so everyone bought Hummers.
This is california
The "logical" response would be for the state to allow 100% tax write-offs for programmers own vehicles - if they were OVER a certain weight.So all the workers had to do was register a side business, buy a HummVee and claim that they used it for work they get the purchase price back.
