The quality difference between pre 2001 electronics and now is astounding. Current products are all utter junk compared to earlier stuff.

IT's called Heriloom and all of them are not patent encumbered.
Eliminate any and all patents and copyrights on living things is the only answer, Devices that were common on farms, seed cleaners, are illegal because of Monsanto, they target farmers that have them, they go after ANY farmer that does not buy their product, because their GM garbage will cross pollinate to your field and suddenly your GM free crops are now tainted with Monsanto IP and now the property of Monsanto.

Eliminate the patent possibility and it neuters Monsanto completely and solves every single problem.

but vikings are more ancient than this.

however, if this is what they used their copper for it might explain why they(northern tribes) had to start using reindeer parts for everything.

in britain you can still keep it(the war on drugs). there's plenty of other substances to keep fighting against.

besides, situation with mj in britain is that if you get caught with a joint/small bag pretty much nothing happens(compared to some other countries where they will raid your property..).

anyhow, it would be pretty easy to entrap these guys, to extract money from them. setup the lights and cameras, wait with your crew and boom, they pay or go to prison for extortion.

False dichotomy, it's not one or the other.

Time and material contracts basically means renting consultants by the hour, short of outright criminal behavior there's no promised time frames, deliverables or guarantees of functionality or quality. The upside is the lack of formalism, I've developed many reports on a T&M basis and basically if you want a filter here and a total there and to add one more column and add a traffic light here and a drill down there just say it and I'll keep working on it until you're happy. Heck, I've taken "requirements" from a single yellow post-it note, as long as the client is happy and the invoices get paid it's a win-win for everyone compared to bids and change orders.

The problem begins if you need anything other than yes-men because basically you're going to lead these people and point them to tasks that need doing and make sure it all comes together to a working solution. Consider it a bit like building a house where every contractor assumes that the rest of the work to bring it up to code will be done by somebody else, you tell the plumber to put a pipe here, the electrician a wire there and the carpenter to board up that wall and they do it, but they don't take any responsibility on whether it's done to code or the overall result. My guess is that Oracle have their asses well covered legally, but often they have to play the scapegoat when the client has been incompetent. Usually they don't want to throw eggs in the face of the manager who hired them, unless it becomes an even bigger PR problem not to.

Which is why this is a never-ending competition, one thing is size but what about mass/gravity? Does it have a magnetic field? Does it have a Jupiter to clear the solar system of debris? Does it have a moon to produce tidal forces? Still, we know there's some slack in that life is almost everywhere on this planet from Sahara to the Arctic.

The flip side of that is that Canonical has been pretty clear that they're not building this for their existing users but rather to get new users on phones, tablets, phablets, convertibles, touchscreen laptops, TVs and whatnot other household devices. To trot out the old Henry Ford quote, if I asked my users what they'd wanted they'd say a faster horse. Well that's you, you want a better "classic" desktop the way it's been for the last 20 years or so but the users they have is 1% of a declining PC market that's being swarmed by other non-PC devices. That's why they won't listen when you complain that they're trying to put a steering wheel and pedals on your horse cart, they're trying to build a car and going back on that is clearly a step backwards compared to their goals.

Yes, he's trying to be Steve Jobs just like Google is, just like Microsoft is and when giants like that throw their weight around it's easy to get flung into irrelevance which is why the new business isn't exactly rolling in and the old business is cranky. Particularly now when Android has rolled in almost everywhere he wanted Ubuntu to be. He could just tuck his tail between his legs, admit defeat and say we'll be building a desktop of the geeks, by the geeks, for the geeks and that's that. Or at least aim the sights back to Microsoft, the old archenemy even though Ubuntu never managed to get very far there. But my impression is that he's too ambitious and stubborn to do that, besides "We're making this new Unity thing that no one wants and we'll force it on our users before its ready" sounds like GNOME 3, KDE 4 and a bunch of other projects so he fits right in.

If you look at Microsoft's pricing, it's fairly obvious why. If you're first getting Outlook for 135 euro then another 135 euro to get everything else is an easy sell-up, particularly since I'm guessing the sales reps will give you a volume rebate on the Office suite but never on Outlook alone. For at least a decade I've heard product after product being called "Outlook killer" but they all seem to fizzle and my impression mostly because they focus on being POP/IMAP clients. Calendaring is probably more essential to an organization, and I don't mean the simple one-off meeting.

When are people available and what meeting rooms are available. Setting up recurring meetings (like say a weekly staff meeting) that lets you easily modify single instances (because this week is easter), calendar sharing, forwarding events with proper notification to the meeting owner, overviews of who will/will not attend or haven't answered, including the agenda or attachments, corporate directories, personal directories, all that practical stuff like that if I start writing a mail to someone in-house it warns me right away they're going to send an away message instead of waiting for me to send it, get the auto-reply, realize what I just send won't work, then another email to say forget that, let's do something else when you're back on Monday.

Geeks hate meetings and scheduling, every one of them myself included. Good calendar software which makes it easy to drown people in meetings is just begging to be swamped with them so it's not exactly an itch we'd like to scratch. We're very busy trying to invent and push non-meeting solutions like email or IM and claim we're solving it better. I'm not going to fire up debate, but the fact of the matter is that getting all of the people involved in the same room at the same time to discuss/decide matters is still a very popular idea. And if you want to get rid of Office, you need to get rid of Outlook and if you want to get rid of Outlook you must handle this well. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like to drop Exchange and the CALs, using non-MS products despite still sending around MS documents so it should be easier than taking down all of MS Office at once.

We already have almost every version of this, hybrid drives for laptops, software techniques that mimic this but they're all fairly stupid and unpredictable, training it to cache the right things take time and suddenly what used to have SSD performance might have been evicted. If you're the kind of user who needs >100GB you probably know what it is taking space. Put your big media (video, photos, music) on D:, everything else like applications and documents stay on C:. The only really tough call is games which often have a huge install size but also app code that benefits from being on an SSD, Steam lets you define multiple library folders so you can have one on C:, one on D: but no easy way to swap them in and out, for now the only supported way is uninstall and reinstall on the other. There are workarounds for that though.

yeah, it's a shame.

and I bet some asshats will stop from patching because the "hacker is already in jail".

yes let's sue MS the creator of the most popular platform used for filesharing.

I am sitting in a $890 chair right now. any good company will do it. I'm thinking you haven't priced real office furniture as the standard desk I am at is $2300 and it's a no frills Steelcase.

had he the power and will to issue such exemption I'm pretty sure the vice chancellor would have done so...

worker bees can use ssd.

because they don't need to store weeks worth of video.