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France approves law stopping Amazon from shipping discounted books for free
French lawmakers have had it up to "here" with Amazon's book-selling tactics and they're not going to take it any more. In a rare alliance, France's ruling Socialist Party and the opposition UMP Party approved a new bill banning the company and other online retailers from shipping discounted books for free. It comes in the form of an amendment to a 32-year-old law that sets the value of new books at fixed prices. Amazon, you see, heavily discounts books, but also ships them at no extra cost, heavily undercutting aggrieved brick-and-mortar retailers. The restriction forces Amazon to cut free shipping for new books sold at reduced prices, but it won't stop French consumers from getting second-hand titles and music pas cher.
Haier's speedy X6 UMPC touts 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo processor
Nah, Haier's X6 UMPC won't turn any heads in the design department, but we must say we're glad it gave a bit more attention to the internals and left the enclosure to the OEMs. Beneath the perfectly average exterior lies a full QWERTY keyboard, Intel's 945GU chipset (you know, from the Ultra Mobile Platform), a 6.5-inch 800 x 480 resolution display, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 30GB 5,400RPM hard drive, webcam, 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, and a GPS receiver to top things off. The standout feature, however, is the choice of processors available on this rig, as power users should adore the 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo L2500 or 1.66GHz L2400. Notably, El Reg suggests that the 720-gram unit sports a battery that provides "four to five hours" of continuous juice, but we imagine taxing that speedy CPU could slice into those number fairly quickly. Still, the Vista-equipped machine packs quite a punch for being so nimble, and while a release date wasn't disclosed, it should start around £580 ($1,165) whenever it lands.[Via Electronista]
