SPARC really excels at highly multithreaded and highly multi-process workloads. Its sequential throughput leaves a lot to be desired but it really shines on some enterprise applications.

You're absolutely right about the pace of the books slowing down but honestly, I really liked the depth and detail.

He died on my birthday.

Worst birthday present ever :(

As a devout user of VMWare Workstation I count it amongst the best purchases that I've ever made. I usually upgrade to each new version as soon as it's available.

There's no indication that legally made grey-market purchases were revoked, only those that were made using fraudulent credit card transactions. Ubisoft doesn't owe anyone anything for those. The original discussion was on what constitutes grey-marketeering.

Milk and cars have very high marginal costs. In fact, many grocery stores sell milk below cost. I used to work as a retail manager in my late teens and the store that I worked at lost about $1.50 on every bag of milk that we sold.

The line between the various divisions of your city is at best distinguished by city bylaws and zoning policy so there's no real reason for there to be a massive price difference across the border given that there's no real barrier to import. A national border on the other hand is subject to customs when importing physical goods. It gets really murky when digital goods are involved. Now, there have been several unsuccessful attempts to block the import of discounted physical goods such as textbooks but these have been mostly unsuccessful.

The comparison that you're looking for is the de-jure relationship versus the de-facto relationship. You're absolutely right about it being used to prevent employers from ducking their obligations under various employment laws. However, a shrinkwrap licence is still a licence. Courts are less likely to read deeply into it, but it's still enforceable to an extent. If the publisher claims in the licence that they have the right to refuse service if a product is used outside of its region then it's unlikely that a court will force them to provide that service. In the case of a physical copy, they're not going to come to your house and take that physical copy away; in the case of a digital copy, they usually won't erase it from your hard disk drive but they may refuse to authenticate your login credentials. Many modern video games are designed such that any tangible element is largely useless without a service element as well.

Video games include a terms of service agreement that is dozens of pages in length, a bike rack does not. It may not be signed repeatedly, but it is still a contract and both parties are bound by it.

Correct. They can however make locally purchased games incompatible with it and even refuse service within that region. I'm not aware of any companies refusing to provide online connectivity for out-of-region consoles but I do know of companies that have redirected online connectivity for out-of-region products back into that region. Blocking it completely would be an extremely crude tactic and it would spark massive consumer backlash but I'm pretty sure that it would be legal.

That's an incredibly naive view of business operations. Additional consumers are nice but if word gets around that a grey-market exists the vendor may end up seeing a decrease in net revenue even if they see an increase in customers. Any profit driven company will try to combat that. For example, the grey-market for post-secondary textbooks is huge and there have been some high profile lawsuits and challenges in recent years.

There's no counter argument to what is either trolling or sheer stupidity.

Good god, did you drop out of high school or get kicked out?

No. A refund is a return payment made from a merchant to a customer. Refunds are not made to third parties that were never part of the original business transaction. The customer should seek restitution from the middleman that made the fraudulent charge.

You're comparing the import of a good to a revocation of a service due breach of contract and/or fraud. Amazing. In other news, apples are still not oranges.

In this case it seems to be fraud related. I'm not aware of any company outright disabling or revoking service for legal grey-market activities but if they really wanted to annoy grey market purchasers they could simply point to a clause in their terms of service allowing them to do so.

That bike rack that you mentioned above is purchased outright, whereas Ubisoft's games are licensed. A better analogy would be leasing a vehicle. Many leasing companies will not allow the lessee to take the vehicle out of the country without permission.

Europe is very economically diverse. Germany has nearly 4x the per-capita GDP as Poland, which happens to be right next door. What's affordable to someone in Germany is not necessarily affordable to someone in Poland.
If a company wants to offer the same service in both countries at regionally appropriate price points they can attach conditions to the use of that service. Region locked game consoles are a good example of this. Outright revoking access to the service is crude, which is why many publishers are switching to language-locked editions. A high-priced English-French-German-Spanish-Italian edition on one side, and a cheap Polish edition on the other. This can negatively affected ex-pats that don't speak the native language, but that's a very small group.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you didn't agree to anything, and neither did Ubisoft which makes neither party beholden to the other and Ubisoft doesn't owe you shit in terms of either service or a refund; or you agreed to the ToS and accept the consequences of breaking them.

That's splitting hairs. The grey market activities harm the vendor which prompts the vendor to react in order to protect their primary revenue. Low income markets usually constitute a rather small portion of a large manufacturer's revenue, so they can live with out it. On the other hand, the low income markets will lose access to the vendor's goods and services.

They didn't purchase the product from Ubisoft, so why should Ubisoft give them a refund? They should seek a refund from the unauthorized retailer.

Wrong.

The marginal cost of production is not the same as the total cost of production. The marginal cost of production is the cost to produce one more unit of a product. In the case of easily replicable digital products the marginal cost is negligible, especially when distributed digitally. The total cost of production includes other factors such as the massive amount of capital sunk into developing and marketing the product. Fixed costs need to be recouped for a project to break even and eventually turn a profit. If the price were depressed to the marginal cost of production the company would never recoup any of the fixed cost and hence never break even much less turn a profit.

No. Usage of UPlay and other online distribution services is dependant upon an agreement between the licencor and licencee. If that agreement clearly states that licence cannot be transferred to another party without the consent of the service provider or that the licence must be purchased from an authorized retailer then any third party that purchases the licence runs the risk of the service provider refusing to provide service.

Anyone who purchases a game is free to sell the physical copy of the game (first sale doctrine), but the publisher is in no way required to provide service to the party that purchased it.

That's called grey-market operations. There's nothing fraudulent about it, but manufacturers are going to increasingly greater lengths to prevent grey market activities. Games that are sold in low price markets often have limited languages, region-locked multiplayer, sanitized art assets, etc...

It's a marketing tactic called price discrimination.

The same product (usually a product with a very low marginal cost) is offered at different prices in different markets with the price tuned appropriately for each market.

A product may be offered at $60 in the North American market because that's what the market accepts as a fair value. On the other hand, $60 may be too high for a market such as eastern Europe, China, or South Asia where the per-capita income is much lower. Since the marginal cost of the product is very low, the product is sold at a lower price in regions with lower income. However, this opens up opportunities for grey-market activities where third parties purchase the product in the lower priced markets and resell them in the higher priced markets at a price below that of the original manufacturer. The third party then pockets the difference.

Grey market activities ultimately harm lower-income markets because these markets contribute substantially less to the manufacturer's bottom line. If revenue from the manufacturer's primary markets is threatened, they'll simply end price discrimination or cut off the weaker markets all together.

There are a couple of reasons.

1. The USA provided significant material support to Pakistan prior to and during the Indo-Pakistani wars which were to some extent seen as a cold war proxy conflict between the USA and USSR; this support and military cooperation continues in various forms, so India is naturally wary of American actions in the region. Although the cold war is for the most part over and the relationship between Russia and the USA has warmed substantially, India and Pakistan are still constantly at each other's throats; fatal border clashes are quite common.

2. India is a democracy but it is a country that is still plagued by a socially ingrained class system that just won't die. Corruption, strife, and malnutrition are rampant; while literacy is not. Deflecting blame onto distant, untouchable, and largely uncaring foreign entities is a tried and true method of bolstering domestic support.

3. India is poised to be a potential superpower in the near future, so they're naturally trying to shore up nationalism and a we-can-do-it-ourselves attitude. Conveniently rewriting history, or omitting important contextual information is in no way an Indian invention.