At 9:44 AM -0500 3/4/08, Jason McBrien wrote: People jack the shipping & handling fee to cover the ebay fee's. Buyers don't buy because of insane shipping & handling fee's. Savvy buyers of books can sometimes go to the publisher and get "rare out of print" books far cheaper than eBay. Insane eBay fee's keep sellers from putting stuff on eBay. These sum up just some of the issues I've seen in the past few years with eBay. The frustrating thing is, I recently invested in 3 extra copies of a book that is quite literally "rare and out of print" even though it came out a few months ago. My intention is to sell the copies on eBay once the price goes up a bit more. Another book I was interested in recently was "rare and out of print" simply on pre-orders, you don't want to know what it's going for on eBay, I was lucky enough to get a copy from Barnes & Nobles online. I'm not sure if I have a point with that last paragraph. If I do it is that eBay, Amazon.com, and the other online book selling places have done insane things to the price of books. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:35:35 +0000, Gordon JC Pearce wrote: History has shown that you will have alot of legal costs keeping it online. There are a bunch of Software patents currently owned by others. Mant of which will come out of the bushes with a smile as they slips one hand into your pocket, while others will be waveing C&D orders that will need to be fought. Sad but true...... Bob

Gordon JC Pearce wrote: Right. What to OP probably intended to say was "process and business method patents related to software", which sadly do exist. See, for example, 6,604,107. -- Chris Kennedy chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97 PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97 "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."

Bob Bradlee wrote: He'd be testing with pounds sterling, which might be why he thinks (correctly) that software patents don't exist (yet). Not that this will help him implement a successful competitor to epay: there have been a number of attempts by organisations that have deep enough pockets to withstand a few patent trolls. What they haven't had is eyeballs. We already have the VCM (when it's up :-)) but that only really caters for the likes of us. That's too small a market, I would say. You need to catch all those people with C64s plus something interesting in the cupboard. When they want to get rid of these things, they'll head for somewhere where they can (almost) guarantee that their item will be sold. I'd have a few off-topic items that I want to sell but I don't know of a specialist auction site that deals in TV amplifiers, so it's either going to end up on epay or in the bin (or sit in my junk box :-)). Antonio No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.518 / Virus Database: 269.21.7/1322 - Release Date: 09/03/2008 12:17

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Gordon JC Pearce <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote: The "business practice" patent mess is a failing of the US Patent Office, which is in the executive branch under the department of commerce, and doesn't have much to do with the judiciary.