Here's the joke: Homeopathy.

In Tucson 10%ish of the drinking water comes from reclaimed water (aka filtered sewage). Makes sense in an area with not a lot of fresh water resources. Also in those areas you can have different kinds. You can purchase a non-potable (not for consumption) water source for irrigation. Again, reclaimed water, but it undergoes less filtering and thus is cheaper. Plenty of larger places get a hookup to keep their watering costs down.

It is a very sensible way of doing things and you actually have more control of purity than water that comes out of the ground.

Exactly! Wish they'd kept the brand up for that purpose.

Oh, come on, that's a distinction without any teeth. I'd say the bigger difference is that the first two are one unit per level, while the latter two allow horizontal expansion. The fact that two have microtransactions and the other two don't is mostly irrelevant.

Even better.

Collusion isn't bad, in and of itself. Say you hire someone to paint your house - you're technically "colluding". The issue is when it becomes an anti-trust violation. And the DoJ has looked at patent pools and determined that they're not always automatically anti-trust violations. They certainly can be, but the mere fact that the participants are "colluding" doesn't make it any worse than any other contract. Instead, there has to be things like illegal patent extension or unfair licensing based on market share or some other feature.

First, since when is double-dipping an issue? A design can be protected by both trade dress and design patents. A copyrighted character can also be a trademark (see, e.g., Mr. M. Mouse). The two protections are not coextensive, so what's wrong with having both?

Second, why are you arguing for copyright - with a lifetime+90 year term - as opposed to patents - with a 20 year from filing term? Copyright tends to be much more abusive in that way.

And third, software isn't well protected by copyright. Copyright is useful when that specific article is the one you want: you want Picasso's Guernica, not Billy Bob's Smear of Paint on a Wall; you want "The Avengers" movie, not the Mockbuster "The Revengers"; you want to read about Harry Potter and his Half-assed Plot or whatever Rowling has cranked out, not Larry Kotter and the Temple of Doom. It's why the RIAA/MPAA love copyright so much. And it works for operating systems, since you do want Mac OS or Windows as opposed to Marc OS or Winbows.
But it doesn't work very well for, say, TinyTower- er, DreamHeights- er, SimTower- er, Theme Hotel. Or, say, any one of these 78 games like Minecraft. Copyright doesn't protect against any rebuilding of the same game, provided different sprites and textures are used and the code is original, even if nearly identical. It doesn't prevent reverse engineering, and doesn't prevent the kind of copying Zynga specializes in.

You patent your improvement on the existing patent, and then cross-license with the other patent owner. Or you go ahead with your idea, and pay a couple hundred a month to the patent owner. Either way, net win for you.

Tell that to Nimblebit and everyone else Zynga has run over while being second-to-market.

These will appeal to those who think they need to spend more money than they need to. As a previous poster pointed out, go to the music store (musical instruments) and go to the recording section and buy a DAC (they are really analog to digital / digital to analog converters depending on what direction you are talking about, but most just call them DACs). They have smaller ones for less money than these with equal bitrates and resolution to anything on this list for less money. They are good enough for recording music, they can be used for playback via their output channels. They won't be as small as the easy to lose thumb drive sized gizmos for a thousand quid, but more like the black box sized from the list. But at most you'll pay $US250.00 and some are half that price. In my reply to that other poster, I pointed out a product from MOTU (they make good stuff). The added benefit to these is most come with some decent recording software too, if you don't already have that.

That's true. But at least now western companies get scrutinized a lot more and are less able to get away with shit. The Chinese companies don't have anyone at home who give a shit about where they get the ore and what they do to get it. And they try to avoid any western reporting often with the help from the politicians there. So western media haven't been been reporting what the Chinese do or haven't been able to. I have talked to people who have or currently work in mining in Africa and anyone could ask them about things like Chinese refining operations using crap loads of mercury and just pumping it out into rivers or hidden tailing ponds hastily built. I just talked to a guy over coffee last Sunday, who flies into Guinea periodically on mining related business (mind you he's taking a pass until the Ebola outbreak is taken care of).

FWIW, I don't fret about what my ancestors did. I can't help that and don't subscribe to the idea that I have to pay for their sins or indiscretions other than to have to live with the world they left like everyone else. I worry about what we can do now, and even though western companies try to get away with whatever they can, face it, we do rein them in far, far better than the Chinese do with their "companies" (quotes because really, they are just another arm of the government when they want them to be).

but have the best-quality DACs and filtering that you can find

For Example:
MOTU
Good enough for a single computer
The thing with this is, I don't think you will have enough outputs for surround sound, but you will get very, very good sound at least in stereo.

Don't most Realtek codecs support A3D? I know the ALC662 in this machine does.

Then again, I use HDMI audio.

Obligatory mention of the Covox Speech Thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Radio Shack once made some nice bang-for-the-buck budget audio under their "Realistic" brand.