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Adobe EULA Demands 7000 Years a Day From Humankind

Posted by timothy on from the just-really-fast-readers dept.

oyenamit writes "When was the last time you actually read and understood the EULA before installing a software? Never? You are not in a club of one. Unless you are a legal eagle, it would be almost impossible to fully understand what you are agreeing to. Consider this: The Adobe Flash installer has a EULA that is 3500 words long. Adobe claims that the software is downloaded eight million times a day. If each person takes 10 minutes to read (and understand!) the entire text, they would consume over 1,522 years in just one day. If we put that into man-hours: an 8hr day, 240 working days in a year, that becomes 6944 years in a day. Turn that into a 50-year working life and that's 138 lifetimes a day! The Register deconstructs the text that we all blindly agree to by clicking the 'I have read and understood the...' checkbox." Also, never operate a GPS device in a moving vehicle.

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Half the length of a novelette by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count#In_fiction

    OK, so about ten years ago before my kids were old enough to enter into contracts, I simply had them install my software for me, meaning that no one read and understood the EULA. How are these abominations in any way enforceable??

    --
    Free Martian Whores!
  2. Fascinating by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Interesting
    So, a small number multiplied by a big number results in an even bigger number. Incredible!

    that's 138 lifetimes a day!

    Er, right. Is that a lot? It could have been anything and I would have failed to be surprised, since I had no prior impressions on the subject. Telling us that a human's blood vessels would stretch to the moon and back (or whatever it really is) is interesting and surprising because we know how big a space they're usually crammed into. This is just numbers.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  3. Re:and then again how long are US bills and laws? by N0Man74 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My girlfriend showed me her divorce papers. The paperwork determining ownership of their house, belongings, financial obligations, and custody of their children was far shorter than what I was asked to read for an updated EULA on Netflix, so I could simply watch another episode of the IT Crowd...