Yeah, I feel the same way about our mail virus scanner.
I'm using amavisd-new to reject spam in real-time, and that sorta came with clamav support and I just went and turned on anti-virus updates. Frankly, I have no idea how useful it is.
Everyone should be running antivirus on their desktop. Rejecting viruses is actually more time consuming than just letting them in. If this is going to be some hassle, I'll just disable it.
As a customer you would only have to demonstrate that you could reasonably be expected to know about the feature - considering the amount of press the console got on the web before launch, with every single function and feature dissected and analysed, you'd have to have been living under a rock to not know about Other OS.
Not entirely. If Sony itself had never mentioned it, they'd be fine. Just because it happens to run Other OS, and someone figured that out and started telling people, doesn't mean Sony has to keep that ability. Even if it had been put in there on purpose.
However, Sony itself repeatedly promoted it, and in fact pointed it out in the first place. Not on the box, granted, but in press releases, and in PR events, and all sorts of things. Hell, it's in the manual, apparently.
Maybe, but it depends whether the feature was actually advertised, or just happened to be there.
There are three sorts of features.
There are ones that everyone expects such a device to have. For example, all things sold as bicycles are assumed to have some sort of steering mechanism. A PS3, being a gaming console, you'd expect it to, for example, hook up to a television.
That is the implied fitness for purpose, the one that the PS3 EULA disclaims. Although, legally, that makes no sense. You're required to notify purchasers in advance if a product does not have what such a product is normally considered to have. It's not some sort of contractual thing, you have to tell them 'This product might be broken for the normal purposes you'd use it for', so they can examine it before purchase. You can't sell it to them, and then quickly sign something to cover your ass.
Likewise, I don't think it's vaguely reasonable to sell new, correctly manufacturer products 'as is', as software normally is. 'As is' is for broken stuff, so some guy who wants to sell a broken car to someone for parts can't get sued later for selling a non-working car. But whatever, that's not what we're talking about here.
The second sort of feature are, as you said, advertised features. And, yes, a good deal of advertising was made out of the fact that PS3s could run Linux. It wasn't on the box, but it advertised everywhere else.
And, sadly for Sony, you can't disclaim advertised features.
If I have a bike without steering, I can sell it 'as is', and people are required to inspect it before buying, and presumably not buy it if they need to be able to steer. However, I can't sell it 'as is' and, at the same time, have a big sign saying 'With steering', and then claim i sold it 'as is'. Period. That's just out and out fraud.
The third sort of feature, just for completeness, is extra features that aren't advertised, and aren't expected, but just exist. For example, various 'run pirate game' hacks for consoles. Manufacturers have every right to close those up and not tell people. (Whether or not they have to the right to close them on already sold devices is an interesting question.)
I stay about two years behind on PC hardware, and it seems like, 75% of the time, I'm way way ahead of consoles. And spending about 25% of the cost. (At this point, you can actually buy a laptop more powerful than a PS3 for PS3 prices. Crazy.)
Every couple of years new consoles come out that mostly match PC levels, and I, might, gasp, be temporarily behind until I upgrade in a year. As I tend to buy games a year behind anyway, whatever.
I honestly don't understand why people buy consoles.
Yes, I've heard nonsense about 'playing on TV screens'...but, newsflash, you can do that with a PC too. And buy wireless joysticks and whatnot. Even assuming you don't want to hook up your existing PC (And with wireless controls and some long HDMI cable, you can do it even in another room.), it's often cheaper to build an entire new PC than buy a console. (And, while you're at it, stick XBMC on there on there, buy a $35 MS remote, and watch videos too.)
I guess an argument can be made for multiple players, as many console games have better 'multiple people playing off the same screen' setup, but it seems a sorta weak argument, and if people would start playing PC games that way, we'd quickly have split-screen PC games.
The only console I understand buying is the Wii, because it actually is pretty cheap, and you can't really get those sort of casual active games on the PC. But that only makes sense because Nintendo intelligently dropped out of the 'more power!' race to stupidity that consoles were using as a selling point but, by any objective measure, were constantly losing to PCs. (Simply because consoles took years to come out.)
While a bunch of other people have pointed out that doesn't really fly, I have to point out it doesn't matter.
Warranty of "fitness for a particular purpose" is talking about the implied warranty of fitness. When I go into a car lot, and purchase a car, it is implied that said car can, for example, lock the doors. When I purchase something sold as a microwave oven, it is implied that it can heat food via microwaves. If I purchase a chest of drawers, it is implied that said drawers can open and close and I can put things in them. Something sold as a 'telephone' better be able to 'ring' and 'dial'.
This is just a sort of 'general expectations' of society. If you're selling stuff under a certain name, it has to be able to what people, in general, expect 'that thing' to be able to do, or you have explicitly label it as unable to do that, or sell it 'as is'. That's the implied warranty of fitness. You call it X, it looks like X, it better be able to, generally, 'do all X-ish things'.
This is only true for things that people would expect all items of that sort to have. For example, things sold as 'cars' do not need air conditioning. Some cars do not have that. If you buy a 'car' without checking, and it doesn't have that, tough. Likewise, it is not 'implied' that consoles can run other OSes.
It is, incidentally, probably not reasonably to assert your product doesn't met the implied warranty of fitness in an EULA. You almost certainly have to tell people before they buy it. That's not an ''agreement' between buyer and seller, it's a notification to the buyer. As at that point, they're supposed to inspect it to see if this 'broken' things meets their specific needs and if they still want to buy it. Hence, having it in the EULA entirely defeats the purpose. But that's neither here nor there, because we're not talking about 'implied' anything:
Sony actually stated a purpose, repeatedly. It stopped being implied. (In fact, that purpose wouldn't be implied anyway.) They said you could run other OSes on it.
You cannot disclaim a stated purpose. If I say ' You can do X with this', and sell it to you, even if I disclaim 'fitness for purpose', and you cannot do X with it, and I know that, I just committed fraud.
Anything seller specifically say you can do with something, you have to be able to do with it. Period. It doesn't matter if they sell it 'as is' or disclaim anything...if they do that and also claim 'You can do X with it', the 'You can do X with it' is what matters.
I'm not saying that car dealers are not thieving rob-dog scumbags but they will at least give you the option of a Bose sound system or include it in the price, you know, *to keep*.
Indeed. The internet and computers have managed to invent a whole new level of scumbagness.
Before that, if you were stupid, they might sell you a pig in a bag that was actually a cat (Giving rise to both the expression 'buying a pig in a poke' and 'letting the cat out of the bag'.) or a disease ridden horse they tarted up for an horse, or a poorly constructed car, or whatever.
Throughout history there's been plenty of ways to rip people off, but, like you said, all of them stopped at the sale. Intelligent people would inspect very closely what they were buying, and make their choice, and that was that.
No one in the entire history of 'selling stuff' would ever suggest that the seller could, in three months, come about and swap out the horse you purchased for a different, crappier horse. Or remove the headlights of your car.
I don't buy hardware from Sony for the same reason I don't watch sci-fi on Fox or why I don't consider 'rebates' as part of the cost when making purchases.
I sometimes call it a boycott, but it's not one of those as much as 'those things have repeatedly screwed me over, and are going to screw me over again if I have anything to do with them' logic.
'Doctor, doctor, my hands hurts when I do this.'
'Well, then, stop doing that.'
When you do Sony, it hurts. Stop doing Sony. It's not rocket surgery.
Please stop perpetuating lies that various entities have claimed but are utterly, completely, legally incorrect.
Under the law, if you exchange money for something without making any sort of agreement beforehand, you have, indeed, purchased that thing. If you walk into a store, pick something up off the shelf, carry it to the counter, set it down, hand money to the clerk, get a receipt, and walk out with that thing, you own it. There's plenty of case law about this.
Including a copy of software in a box.
Now, it's a copy of a copyrighted thing, so you can't make copy or do various other things forbidden by copyright law, but it is still a copy that you own. Copyright restrictions are restrictions under the law, not ones that the publisher has randomly made up. They don't get to randomly make up new ones. (The law does give the publisher to grant permissions to violate those rules if they want, but the rules themselves are legal ones.)
It's like you buy a car, and the city you live in forbids parking on a street unless you are a resident of the house you park in front of, or unless you have permission of the owner. The fact they can grant you one exception to how you are normally disallowed, by law, from using your car does not mean you have leased your car from that house! No, not even if you bought it from that homeowner.
And, on a more practical note, it's hard to see how anyone could be in a contractual agreement with the publisher anyway. 99.99% of the time software owners never even interacted with the publisher...most of the time, software is purchased from a third party. So, at best, you could have a contract with them. (Which you don't.)
Did GameStop license the software and somehow got the ability to sublicense it to other people? I'd really like to see that contract. I suspect they simply made a purchase, just like any other reseller makes with a wholesaler. You can't magically jump up the chain and have a contractual relationship with the publisher when you buy from a reseller!
Now, later, you might have agreed to some EULA that (claim to) restrict what you can do with the software more than normal copyright law, but that's irrelevant to the fact you purchased that copy. An EULA can't retroactively undo a purchase from a third party. (I supposed, in theory, it could assert that you're selling it back to them in exchange for something, but I've never seen one do that.)
The idea that you 'license' software dates from ages ago, when copyright law didn't really cover software, and hence you actually did license it...and by 'you', I mean 'people running mainframes', as that was all that existed at the time. And, indeed, plenty of mainframe software is still licensed...by which , I mean, people actually sit down and sign contracts beforehand.
This 'licensing' concept does not, and has never, under any circumstances, applied to any copyrighted work that people walk into stores and purchase.
You really shouldn't work like that. You're ripping yourself off.
Everyone, at most, only spends half their time doing actual productive work. No one can do productive things 8 hours a day.
In blue collar jobs, this gets disguised by 'working slower'. Assemble lines operate slightly slower than people could do, people wander around, etc.
In white collar work, it's much the same way. People read email, have meetings, 'plan', etc. (Look at me, I'm on slashdot!)
The fact you can do your four hours of work straight is nice and all, but you need to figure out what to do with the rest of your time.
Think of it this way...what you could hypothetically should be doing is working eight hours straight each day...which would wear you down and require you to relax and not get much done every other day off, right?
So there you go. Same amount of work done if you didn't leave early. You've just decided to structure it as four hours a day so it doesn't wear you out. (Saving sick days and stress related healthcare costs.)
Because I am not the only person who lives in my house? Because I also have guests who'd actually like to be able to operate the HTPC? Because my phone is often charging?
People only want 'unlimited' because they're trained by the ISPs very own commercials to want unlimited. 'Limits', and the lack thereof, is entirely unrelated to what people actually want from their ISP. People want 'instant response' from their ISP.
People want web pages to come up as fast as possible. People want to be able to watch streaming video. 75% couldn't care less how fast stuff downloads, and even more couldn't care about how much they're allowed to download. Because they're downloading everything while using the computer, be it a web page or streaming video, and hence can't possibly hit any bandwidth caps unless they're watching twelve hours of video a day. It's constant unattended users of the connection that hit limits, and there's a small fraction of users who actually know how to do that.
'People want unlimited', yes, but solely because companies constantly run ads touting 'unlimited' like it's some sort of useful feature.
Making it a real hassle to people who actually want unlimited, and would pay for it, and people like me who do download things, but would be perfectly willing to have some sort of daily connection cap or something...if, of course, they'd advertise and sell that tier.
And the cost of overages should never be more than twice simply buying the actual 'unlimited' plan. People should be getting hit with unexpected $200 bills, not $3000. You might have a valid point 'If ISPs can't rip people off one way they will another', but that's hardly a reason to give up.
If the ISPs would just charge enough for their unlimited plans to actually offer unlimited usage and come up with some fair metering system (with a fee cap somewhere a bit above the unlimited plan's price) for people who are usually lighter users, then we wouldn't have this mess. The "unlimited, but it's really X GB" plans are basically fraud, and that has nothing to do with reasonable oversubscription of the ISP's peering or upstream capacity.
So, yeah, that's exactly what I was saying.
The problem is, once you introduce people to the concept that they're using about 2% of the 'internet connection' they purchased, and have always been using that much, but have paid full price this entire time, you're going to have some annoyed people, but, more importantly, be unable to undo that.
It appeared to be less useful than the actual built-in browser. I kept poking around and saying 'Is this it?'.
Even the sole 'feature' it had, 'full screen', is idiotic....they don't get rid of top status bar, and leave two stupid buttons on the bottom, making it microscopically more space than the built-in one.
I'm leaving it installed for the single fact it can render in 'mobile' mode (With a damn global toggle), and a few websites are better that way.
A lot of people get the laws confused about 'blocking traffic', and think they has something with the traffic lights.
When you enter an intersection, or in any situation where you're stopped and then move forward across other directions of traffic, you must have somewhere to go. There must be a clear space on the other side that you are aiming at, one currently, and for the foreseeable future, devoid of cars stopped there, that you can get out of the way of the other lanes of traffic, or you are impeding traffic.
If there is not somewhere to put your car, you are impeding traffic/block the intersection/whatever your state charges you with. Even if that space luckily clears by the red light, often you still were legally impending traffic and can be charged.
You don't have to be able to reach it, though. If it's across a left turn, and you get stuck unable to turn, legally, you're fine. As long as you can say 'That spot, right there, is where I'm going, I just can't get there because of these other lanes of traffic.'.
Also, legally, if it's be filled before you get there and you can't anticipate that, you're good, too. For example, if you're turning left, and several cars turn right and fill up the lane you're turning into. If you could see what they were going to do before you entered the intersection, that's bad for you, but, legally, you're okay if you didn't know it would be filled. But good luck arguing that traffic court.
These laws have nothing to do with traffic light laws, except that traffic lights are one of the few places the right-of-way changes independent of your actions, and you are supposed to be clear when your right-of-way vanishes. Other places, like stop signs, you have the right-of-way until you're done with the intersection, so impeding traffic is more of a judgment call and cops rarely charge people with it. (But they still can.)
No, he's (sorta) right, because he's disagreeing with how idiots think is a 'gold standard' works, whereas you're disagreeing with how one actually work
The problem with a money supply that doesn't expand (or contract) at the right speed is what you said. That's why we can't have a gold standard. (Hell, there isn't actually enough mined gold in the world to operate our economy.)
However, if you have a money supply that can't expand at all, not even via fractional-reserve banking, forget small problems like 'crushing economic contraction'...you've got bigger problems to worry about.
A gold standard does not, per se, disallow fractional reserve banking (Like, duh, existed for all of US history on the gold standard), although most proponents of the gold standard seem to think otherwise. They seem to think that, under a gold standard, all 'money', even numbers on computers in banks, would literally be backed by a piece of gold. That all money 'actually exists as gold'. This is what hasdikarlsam is arguing against.
That would possibly be the stupidest economic system known to man. 'Price deflation' is one of the saner issues we'd have under that silliness.
For example, people owing money would reduce, slightly, the money supply instead of expanding it. (Assuming you can actually loan people money at all, and debtors don't have to have 'anti-gold' in a warehouse somewhere.) With someone actually removing even a tiny amount of money from circulation, and without the ability to make money out of thin air, if only for a few seconds, this could actually result in 'wedged' economies like hasdikarlsam said, like a damn traffic jam or something.
The idea of this happening to the entire US economy, however, is crazy...although a gold standard is itself crazy, and lacking fractional-reserve banking is so far crazy it can't see land, so I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about what is 'crazy' under that inconceivable system.
So, yes, he's wrong, that a 'gold standard' doesn't result in that dumbness, as under a gold standard you'd just borrow, aka, create out of thin air, money from the bank and pay in a circle. But many 'gold standard' morons seem to think 'gold standard' = 'every individual dollar anywhere is backed with a piece of gold for it'. And they think we should go 'back' to that. (Here's a fun question...ask them how the banks failed under the 'gold standard' during the Great Depression. They won't be able to explain it, because they have no idea what they're talking about.)
Strangely enough, this has actually happened a few times in history.
It happened in England once, later middle ages, where the government essentially traded away all actual currency to other countries. It essentially taxed all money out of existence, and spent it elsewhere.
This resulted in, essentially, the invention of 'fiet currency', depending on how you looked at it. At the time, checking already existed, although a good deal less formal and only the rich would do it. Generally checks were cashed quickly. (Because no one had any form of ID, and almost no one even had a bank account, and checks was less regulated, so holding a check was just tempting people to steal it from you, or the account to run dry and the check to bounce.)
But, when they ran out of physical cash, important respected people would write checks telling the bank to disburse funds (Which they didn't have) to the holder of the paper, (Aka, a check to 'CASH'.) which other people would then trade as if they were currency. (I don't know how you'd do change...take it back to the person, have him write two smaller checks and destroy the first?)
They would eventually make it back to the bank for safekeeping, and half the time could magically all be canceled out. And any holders of all non-eliminated debt would get new, consolidated checks to 'spend'.
This sounds dangerous, but it was, in a sense, self-regulated...only the rich could even write checks, and as they had to pay back all money they owed people, they weren't going to keep 'issuing' check-money.
Incidentally, that example is stupid. What if the money hadn't come full circle? Then the hotelier would owe some out-of-town person $100 and be unable to pay! (Which is a lot different from owing some money to someone down the street.)
It's even stupider, because it not only assumes 0 liquid cash, but that no bank exists that would lend anyone any more money. (Which then raises the question of how, exactly, everyone 'owes' all this money in the first place.)
That's not the problem. The problem is that they simply don't want to be honest, because being honest would either result in large customer annoyances, or a tiered system.
And they're still making an assload of money overcharging people for 'high speed' DSL who don't want 'high speed', they want 'low latency' and 'high burst speed'.
The way it's set up now, it's like everyone paying 24 dollars a day in gas, because people average 60 mph and their car gets 30 mpg, there are 24 hours in the day, and they're charged fifty cents a gallon.
Which might, indeed, be some sort of 'average' that works out , but it isn't really reasonable for people who drive 10 minutes into town every day, and it isn't reasonable for ISP to collect from NASCAR drivers who drive 24/7.
The way it is now is just stupid, and the fact ISPs are bitching and whining about people who go over their estimates, who cost them more than they pay, while not giving a flying fuck that probably half the people paying their services are buying too much internet by fiftyfold, tells you what's actually going on. As does the fact they're bitching about services that cause people to use two-thirds their supposedly purchased bandwidth, for an hour or two. (Things like Hulu and Netflix.)
ISPs need to charge the actual price of gas plus a flat fee. And they can do some 'cell phone' type pricing, where you buy estimated bandwidth in advance, and get charged or throttled if over. But they're currently happy with overselling to almost everyone, it's just those people who 'abuse' them in in the other direction that's pissing them off.
Google, you ordered thirty six-foot sub sandwiches for your giant party, but you didn't buy our drinks, which are our biggest profit margin. How dare you use canisters and a rented fountain dispenser? We can't do business with you any more.
Actually, that would be a fairly reasonable thing to do. Once profit margins get below a certain point, it makes sense to concentrate on other business, even if you're still 'making a profit' there. Perhaps they have a fixed amount of sandwich-making capacity and would really like to sell them with drinks. (Of course, the real solution is to charge more for sandwiches and less for drinks, but presumably their prices are some sort of 'people are stupid and overpay for drinks' trick and makes sense for them.)
But that's not this. This is more like having a sandwich store next door to a zoo and demanding that the zoo start paying the sandwich place for 'providing' food that people eat while strolling through the zoo.
Phrased that way, that makes sense for about a half a second. People just came to the store/ISP and paid for something, which they then ate/used while using someone's else stuff for free. No one owes anyone anything.
I've got an HTPC operating off a 8gig USB flash drive. It actually downloads stuff to itself, and then moves it across the network.
I keep the NAS it uses in another room.(I wish I could actually get hellanzb working on the NAS instead.)
It does have a DVD drive, but I can't imagine how that would bother anyone unless they were actually watching a DVD, and there's not actually any way to play DVDs without, duh, spinning them.
Ah, yes, that imaginary Obamacare where the government has massive amounts of interaction with citizens.
Meanwhile, in what just passed, everyone has to buy health insurance from private companies, so it's really hard to see at what point the government would be requiring any form of ID.(1)
The only place the government is going to be interacting with anyone is paying taxes and distributing subsidies to cover health insurance...and the government has always required biometeric identification to pay taxes and receive tax rebates...oh, wait, no it hasn't.
In fact, it doesn't require any identification, which is actually somewhat odd when you think about it. The only thing stopping you from mailing in someone else's taxes and thus getting someone else's tax rebate is a simple employee address verification and that private banks won't cash the check.
I'm sure they'll start requiring ID just for your paranoid fantasies, though.
1) Ironically, the right tried to keep people here illegally from buying into the public option, and if they had done that, you actually would have to show ID to get that insurance Sadly, the public option was killed.
For all we know he simply didn't want to come in, and the school didn't force the issue (As attempting to pull someone out of a tree can, in fact, be dangerous.), but left him out there with someone keeping an eye on him out the window.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, #2 happened. The software was informed, six months ago, and was constantly writing messages in the log file.
Yeah, I feel the same way about our mail virus scanner.
I'm using amavisd-new to reject spam in real-time, and that sorta came with clamav support and I just went and turned on anti-virus updates. Frankly, I have no idea how useful it is.
Everyone should be running antivirus on their desktop. Rejecting viruses is actually more time consuming than just letting them in. If this is going to be some hassle, I'll just disable it.
As a customer you would only have to demonstrate that you could reasonably be expected to know about the feature - considering the amount of press the console got on the web before launch, with every single function and feature dissected and analysed, you'd have to have been living under a rock to not know about Other OS.
Not entirely. If Sony itself had never mentioned it, they'd be fine. Just because it happens to run Other OS, and someone figured that out and started telling people, doesn't mean Sony has to keep that ability. Even if it had been put in there on purpose.
However, Sony itself repeatedly promoted it, and in fact pointed it out in the first place. Not on the box, granted, but in press releases, and in PR events, and all sorts of things. Hell, it's in the manual, apparently.
Go with the Barnes and Noble nook. that's what I'm buying if I buy one.
As book sellers, I trust their copyright instincts better than Sony.
Same with Amazon, although I like supporting brick and mortar stores.
Sony has been infected with both MPAA and RIAA copyright insanity. God only knows when they'll decide their books were only licensed.
Yes, yes, the DRM is essentially the same on all the ebook things, but I'm just saying that I trust a bookseller's philosophy more than Sony.
Barnes and Noble actually lets you come into the store and read books! Without buying them! Inconceivable!
Maybe, but it depends whether the feature was actually advertised, or just happened to be there.
There are three sorts of features.
There are ones that everyone expects such a device to have. For example, all things sold as bicycles are assumed to have some sort of steering mechanism. A PS3, being a gaming console, you'd expect it to, for example, hook up to a television.
That is the implied fitness for purpose, the one that the PS3 EULA disclaims. Although, legally, that makes no sense. You're required to notify purchasers in advance if a product does not have what such a product is normally considered to have. It's not some sort of contractual thing, you have to tell them 'This product might be broken for the normal purposes you'd use it for', so they can examine it before purchase. You can't sell it to them, and then quickly sign something to cover your ass.
Likewise, I don't think it's vaguely reasonable to sell new, correctly manufacturer products 'as is', as software normally is. 'As is' is for broken stuff, so some guy who wants to sell a broken car to someone for parts can't get sued later for selling a non-working car. But whatever, that's not what we're talking about here.
The second sort of feature are, as you said, advertised features. And, yes, a good deal of advertising was made out of the fact that PS3s could run Linux. It wasn't on the box, but it advertised everywhere else.
And, sadly for Sony, you can't disclaim advertised features.
If I have a bike without steering, I can sell it 'as is', and people are required to inspect it before buying, and presumably not buy it if they need to be able to steer. However, I can't sell it 'as is' and, at the same time, have a big sign saying 'With steering', and then claim i sold it 'as is'. Period. That's just out and out fraud.
The third sort of feature, just for completeness, is extra features that aren't advertised, and aren't expected, but just exist. For example, various 'run pirate game' hacks for consoles. Manufacturers have every right to close those up and not tell people. (Whether or not they have to the right to close them on already sold devices is an interesting question.)
Just asserting lies doesn't make them true.
And Pystar was in violation of the DMCA.
Indeed.
I stay about two years behind on PC hardware, and it seems like, 75% of the time, I'm way way ahead of consoles. And spending about 25% of the cost. (At this point, you can actually buy a laptop more powerful than a PS3 for PS3 prices. Crazy.)
Every couple of years new consoles come out that mostly match PC levels, and I, might, gasp, be temporarily behind until I upgrade in a year. As I tend to buy games a year behind anyway, whatever.
I honestly don't understand why people buy consoles.
Yes, I've heard nonsense about 'playing on TV screens'...but, newsflash, you can do that with a PC too. And buy wireless joysticks and whatnot. Even assuming you don't want to hook up your existing PC (And with wireless controls and some long HDMI cable, you can do it even in another room.), it's often cheaper to build an entire new PC than buy a console. (And, while you're at it, stick XBMC on there on there, buy a $35 MS remote, and watch videos too.)
I guess an argument can be made for multiple players, as many console games have better 'multiple people playing off the same screen' setup, but it seems a sorta weak argument, and if people would start playing PC games that way, we'd quickly have split-screen PC games.
The only console I understand buying is the Wii, because it actually is pretty cheap, and you can't really get those sort of casual active games on the PC. But that only makes sense because Nintendo intelligently dropped out of the 'more power!' race to stupidity that consoles were using as a selling point but, by any objective measure, were constantly losing to PCs. (Simply because consoles took years to come out.)
While a bunch of other people have pointed out that doesn't really fly, I have to point out it doesn't matter.
Warranty of "fitness for a particular purpose" is talking about the implied warranty of fitness. When I go into a car lot, and purchase a car, it is implied that said car can, for example, lock the doors. When I purchase something sold as a microwave oven, it is implied that it can heat food via microwaves. If I purchase a chest of drawers, it is implied that said drawers can open and close and I can put things in them. Something sold as a 'telephone' better be able to 'ring' and 'dial'.
This is just a sort of 'general expectations' of society. If you're selling stuff under a certain name, it has to be able to what people, in general, expect 'that thing' to be able to do, or you have explicitly label it as unable to do that, or sell it 'as is'. That's the implied warranty of fitness. You call it X, it looks like X, it better be able to, generally, 'do all X-ish things'.
This is only true for things that people would expect all items of that sort to have. For example, things sold as 'cars' do not need air conditioning. Some cars do not have that. If you buy a 'car' without checking, and it doesn't have that, tough. Likewise, it is not 'implied' that consoles can run other OSes.
It is, incidentally, probably not reasonably to assert your product doesn't met the implied warranty of fitness in an EULA. You almost certainly have to tell people before they buy it. That's not an ''agreement' between buyer and seller, it's a notification to the buyer. As at that point, they're supposed to inspect it to see if this 'broken' things meets their specific needs and if they still want to buy it. Hence, having it in the EULA entirely defeats the purpose. But that's neither here nor there, because we're not talking about 'implied' anything:
Sony actually stated a purpose, repeatedly. It stopped being implied. (In fact, that purpose wouldn't be implied anyway.) They said you could run other OSes on it.
You cannot disclaim a stated purpose. If I say ' You can do X with this', and sell it to you, even if I disclaim 'fitness for purpose', and you cannot do X with it, and I know that, I just committed fraud.
Anything seller specifically say you can do with something, you have to be able to do with it. Period. It doesn't matter if they sell it 'as is' or disclaim anything...if they do that and also claim 'You can do X with it', the 'You can do X with it' is what matters.
I'm not saying that car dealers are not thieving rob-dog scumbags but they will at least give you the option of a Bose sound system or include it in the price, you know, *to keep*.
Indeed. The internet and computers have managed to invent a whole new level of scumbagness.
Before that, if you were stupid, they might sell you a pig in a bag that was actually a cat (Giving rise to both the expression 'buying a pig in a poke' and 'letting the cat out of the bag'.) or a disease ridden horse they tarted up for an horse, or a poorly constructed car, or whatever.
Throughout history there's been plenty of ways to rip people off, but, like you said, all of them stopped at the sale. Intelligent people would inspect very closely what they were buying, and make their choice, and that was that.
No one in the entire history of 'selling stuff' would ever suggest that the seller could, in three months, come about and swap out the horse you purchased for a different, crappier horse. Or remove the headlights of your car.
Until software.
Seriously.
I don't buy hardware from Sony for the same reason I don't watch sci-fi on Fox or why I don't consider 'rebates' as part of the cost when making purchases.
I sometimes call it a boycott, but it's not one of those as much as 'those things have repeatedly screwed me over, and are going to screw me over again if I have anything to do with them' logic.
'Doctor, doctor, my hands hurts when I do this.'
'Well, then, stop doing that.'
When you do Sony, it hurts. Stop doing Sony. It's not rocket surgery.
Please stop perpetuating lies that various entities have claimed but are utterly, completely, legally incorrect.
Under the law, if you exchange money for something without making any sort of agreement beforehand, you have, indeed, purchased that thing. If you walk into a store, pick something up off the shelf, carry it to the counter, set it down, hand money to the clerk, get a receipt, and walk out with that thing, you own it. There's plenty of case law about this.
Including a copy of software in a box.
Now, it's a copy of a copyrighted thing, so you can't make copy or do various other things forbidden by copyright law, but it is still a copy that you own. Copyright restrictions are restrictions under the law, not ones that the publisher has randomly made up. They don't get to randomly make up new ones. (The law does give the publisher to grant permissions to violate those rules if they want, but the rules themselves are legal ones.)
It's like you buy a car, and the city you live in forbids parking on a street unless you are a resident of the house you park in front of, or unless you have permission of the owner. The fact they can grant you one exception to how you are normally disallowed, by law, from using your car does not mean you have leased your car from that house! No, not even if you bought it from that homeowner.
And, on a more practical note, it's hard to see how anyone could be in a contractual agreement with the publisher anyway. 99.99% of the time software owners never even interacted with the publisher...most of the time, software is purchased from a third party. So, at best, you could have a contract with them. (Which you don't.)
Did GameStop license the software and somehow got the ability to sublicense it to other people? I'd really like to see that contract. I suspect they simply made a purchase, just like any other reseller makes with a wholesaler. You can't magically jump up the chain and have a contractual relationship with the publisher when you buy from a reseller!
Now, later, you might have agreed to some EULA that (claim to) restrict what you can do with the software more than normal copyright law, but that's irrelevant to the fact you purchased that copy. An EULA can't retroactively undo a purchase from a third party. (I supposed, in theory, it could assert that you're selling it back to them in exchange for something, but I've never seen one do that.)
The idea that you 'license' software dates from ages ago, when copyright law didn't really cover software, and hence you actually did license it...and by 'you', I mean 'people running mainframes', as that was all that existed at the time. And, indeed, plenty of mainframe software is still licensed...by which , I mean, people actually sit down and sign contracts beforehand.
This 'licensing' concept does not, and has never, under any circumstances, applied to any copyrighted work that people walk into stores and purchase.
You really shouldn't work like that. You're ripping yourself off.
Everyone, at most, only spends half their time doing actual productive work. No one can do productive things 8 hours a day.
In blue collar jobs, this gets disguised by 'working slower'. Assemble lines operate slightly slower than people could do, people wander around, etc.
In white collar work, it's much the same way. People read email, have meetings, 'plan', etc. (Look at me, I'm on slashdot!)
The fact you can do your four hours of work straight is nice and all, but you need to figure out what to do with the rest of your time.
Think of it this way...what you could hypothetically should be doing is working eight hours straight each day...which would wear you down and require you to relax and not get much done every other day off, right?
So there you go. Same amount of work done if you didn't leave early. You've just decided to structure it as four hours a day so it doesn't wear you out. (Saving sick days and stress related healthcare costs.)
Because I am not the only person who lives in my house? Because I also have guests who'd actually like to be able to operate the HTPC? Because my phone is often charging?
People only want 'unlimited' because they're trained by the ISPs very own commercials to want unlimited. 'Limits', and the lack thereof, is entirely unrelated to what people actually want from their ISP. People want 'instant response' from their ISP.
People want web pages to come up as fast as possible. People want to be able to watch streaming video. 75% couldn't care less how fast stuff downloads, and even more couldn't care about how much they're allowed to download. Because they're downloading everything while using the computer, be it a web page or streaming video, and hence can't possibly hit any bandwidth caps unless they're watching twelve hours of video a day. It's constant unattended users of the connection that hit limits, and there's a small fraction of users who actually know how to do that.
'People want unlimited', yes, but solely because companies constantly run ads touting 'unlimited' like it's some sort of useful feature.
Making it a real hassle to people who actually want unlimited, and would pay for it, and people like me who do download things, but would be perfectly willing to have some sort of daily connection cap or something...if, of course, they'd advertise and sell that tier.
And the cost of overages should never be more than twice simply buying the actual 'unlimited' plan. People should be getting hit with unexpected $200 bills, not $3000. You might have a valid point 'If ISPs can't rip people off one way they will another', but that's hardly a reason to give up.
If the ISPs would just charge enough for their unlimited plans to actually offer unlimited usage and come up with some fair metering system (with a fee cap somewhere a bit above the unlimited plan's price) for people who are usually lighter users, then we wouldn't have this mess. The "unlimited, but it's really X GB" plans are basically fraud, and that has nothing to do with reasonable oversubscription of the ISP's peering or upstream capacity.
So, yeah, that's exactly what I was saying.
The problem is, once you introduce people to the concept that they're using about 2% of the 'internet connection' they purchased, and have always been using that much, but have paid full price this entire time, you're going to have some annoyed people, but, more importantly, be unable to undo that.
Yeah, I installed and ran Opera mini last night.
It appeared to be less useful than the actual built-in browser. I kept poking around and saying 'Is this it?'.
Even the sole 'feature' it had, 'full screen', is idiotic....they don't get rid of top status bar, and leave two stupid buttons on the bottom, making it microscopically more space than the built-in one.
I'm leaving it installed for the single fact it can render in 'mobile' mode (With a damn global toggle), and a few websites are better that way.
A lot of people get the laws confused about 'blocking traffic', and think they has something with the traffic lights.
When you enter an intersection, or in any situation where you're stopped and then move forward across other directions of traffic, you must have somewhere to go. There must be a clear space on the other side that you are aiming at, one currently, and for the foreseeable future, devoid of cars stopped there, that you can get out of the way of the other lanes of traffic, or you are impeding traffic.
If there is not somewhere to put your car, you are impeding traffic/block the intersection/whatever your state charges you with. Even if that space luckily clears by the red light, often you still were legally impending traffic and can be charged.
You don't have to be able to reach it, though. If it's across a left turn, and you get stuck unable to turn, legally, you're fine. As long as you can say 'That spot, right there, is where I'm going, I just can't get there because of these other lanes of traffic.'.
Also, legally, if it's be filled before you get there and you can't anticipate that, you're good, too. For example, if you're turning left, and several cars turn right and fill up the lane you're turning into. If you could see what they were going to do before you entered the intersection, that's bad for you, but, legally, you're okay if you didn't know it would be filled. But good luck arguing that traffic court.
These laws have nothing to do with traffic light laws, except that traffic lights are one of the few places the right-of-way changes independent of your actions, and you are supposed to be clear when your right-of-way vanishes. Other places, like stop signs, you have the right-of-way until you're done with the intersection, so impeding traffic is more of a judgment call and cops rarely charge people with it. (But they still can.)
No, he's (sorta) right, because he's disagreeing with how idiots think is a 'gold standard' works, whereas you're disagreeing with how one actually work
The problem with a money supply that doesn't expand (or contract) at the right speed is what you said. That's why we can't have a gold standard. (Hell, there isn't actually enough mined gold in the world to operate our economy.)
However, if you have a money supply that can't expand at all, not even via fractional-reserve banking, forget small problems like 'crushing economic contraction'...you've got bigger problems to worry about.
A gold standard does not, per se, disallow fractional reserve banking (Like, duh, existed for all of US history on the gold standard), although most proponents of the gold standard seem to think otherwise. They seem to think that, under a gold standard, all 'money', even numbers on computers in banks, would literally be backed by a piece of gold. That all money 'actually exists as gold'. This is what hasdikarlsam is arguing against.
That would possibly be the stupidest economic system known to man. 'Price deflation' is one of the saner issues we'd have under that silliness.
For example, people owing money would reduce, slightly, the money supply instead of expanding it. (Assuming you can actually loan people money at all, and debtors don't have to have 'anti-gold' in a warehouse somewhere.) With someone actually removing even a tiny amount of money from circulation, and without the ability to make money out of thin air, if only for a few seconds, this could actually result in 'wedged' economies like hasdikarlsam said, like a damn traffic jam or something.
The idea of this happening to the entire US economy, however, is crazy...although a gold standard is itself crazy, and lacking fractional-reserve banking is so far crazy it can't see land, so I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about what is 'crazy' under that inconceivable system.
So, yes, he's wrong, that a 'gold standard' doesn't result in that dumbness, as under a gold standard you'd just borrow, aka, create out of thin air, money from the bank and pay in a circle. But many 'gold standard' morons seem to think 'gold standard' = 'every individual dollar anywhere is backed with a piece of gold for it'. And they think we should go 'back' to that. (Here's a fun question...ask them how the banks failed under the 'gold standard' during the Great Depression. They won't be able to explain it, because they have no idea what they're talking about.)
Strangely enough, this has actually happened a few times in history.
It happened in England once, later middle ages, where the government essentially traded away all actual currency to other countries. It essentially taxed all money out of existence, and spent it elsewhere.
This resulted in, essentially, the invention of 'fiet currency', depending on how you looked at it. At the time, checking already existed, although a good deal less formal and only the rich would do it. Generally checks were cashed quickly. (Because no one had any form of ID, and almost no one even had a bank account, and checks was less regulated, so holding a check was just tempting people to steal it from you, or the account to run dry and the check to bounce.)
But, when they ran out of physical cash, important respected people would write checks telling the bank to disburse funds (Which they didn't have) to the holder of the paper, (Aka, a check to 'CASH'.) which other people would then trade as if they were currency. (I don't know how you'd do change...take it back to the person, have him write two smaller checks and destroy the first?)
They would eventually make it back to the bank for safekeeping, and half the time could magically all be canceled out. And any holders of all non-eliminated debt would get new, consolidated checks to 'spend'.
This sounds dangerous, but it was, in a sense, self-regulated...only the rich could even write checks, and as they had to pay back all money they owed people, they weren't going to keep 'issuing' check-money.
Incidentally, that example is stupid. What if the money hadn't come full circle? Then the hotelier would owe some out-of-town person $100 and be unable to pay! (Which is a lot different from owing some money to someone down the street.)
It's even stupider, because it not only assumes 0 liquid cash, but that no bank exists that would lend anyone any more money. (Which then raises the question of how, exactly, everyone 'owes' all this money in the first place.)
That's not the problem. The problem is that they simply don't want to be honest, because being honest would either result in large customer annoyances, or a tiered system.
And they're still making an assload of money overcharging people for 'high speed' DSL who don't want 'high speed', they want 'low latency' and 'high burst speed'.
The way it's set up now, it's like everyone paying 24 dollars a day in gas, because people average 60 mph and their car gets 30 mpg, there are 24 hours in the day, and they're charged fifty cents a gallon.
Which might, indeed, be some sort of 'average' that works out , but it isn't really reasonable for people who drive 10 minutes into town every day, and it isn't reasonable for ISP to collect from NASCAR drivers who drive 24/7.
The way it is now is just stupid, and the fact ISPs are bitching and whining about people who go over their estimates, who cost them more than they pay, while not giving a flying fuck that probably half the people paying their services are buying too much internet by fiftyfold, tells you what's actually going on. As does the fact they're bitching about services that cause people to use two-thirds their supposedly purchased bandwidth, for an hour or two. (Things like Hulu and Netflix.)
ISPs need to charge the actual price of gas plus a flat fee. And they can do some 'cell phone' type pricing, where you buy estimated bandwidth in advance, and get charged or throttled if over. But they're currently happy with overselling to almost everyone, it's just those people who 'abuse' them in in the other direction that's pissing them off.
Google, you ordered thirty six-foot sub sandwiches for your giant party, but you didn't buy our drinks, which are our biggest profit margin. How dare you use canisters and a rented fountain dispenser? We can't do business with you any more.
Actually, that would be a fairly reasonable thing to do. Once profit margins get below a certain point, it makes sense to concentrate on other business, even if you're still 'making a profit' there. Perhaps they have a fixed amount of sandwich-making capacity and would really like to sell them with drinks. (Of course, the real solution is to charge more for sandwiches and less for drinks, but presumably their prices are some sort of 'people are stupid and overpay for drinks' trick and makes sense for them.)
But that's not this. This is more like having a sandwich store next door to a zoo and demanding that the zoo start paying the sandwich place for 'providing' food that people eat while strolling through the zoo.
Phrased that way, that makes sense for about a half a second. People just came to the store/ISP and paid for something, which they then ate/used while using someone's else stuff for free. No one owes anyone anything.
I've got an HTPC operating off a 8gig USB flash drive. It actually downloads stuff to itself, and then moves it across the network.
I keep the NAS it uses in another room.(I wish I could actually get hellanzb working on the NAS instead.)
It does have a DVD drive, but I can't imagine how that would bother anyone unless they were actually watching a DVD, and there's not actually any way to play DVDs without, duh, spinning them.
Yeah. If you have to operate an HTPC with a mouse or keyboard, it ain't an HTPC. It's just a PC hooked to a TV.
You can have those things hooked up, but the thing you should be reaching for 95% of the time with an HTPC is the remote control.
Ah, yes, that imaginary Obamacare where the government has massive amounts of interaction with citizens.
Meanwhile, in what just passed, everyone has to buy health insurance from private companies, so it's really hard to see at what point the government would be requiring any form of ID.(1)
The only place the government is going to be interacting with anyone is paying taxes and distributing subsidies to cover health insurance...and the government has always required biometeric identification to pay taxes and receive tax rebates...oh, wait, no it hasn't.
In fact, it doesn't require any identification, which is actually somewhat odd when you think about it. The only thing stopping you from mailing in someone else's taxes and thus getting someone else's tax rebate is a simple employee address verification and that private banks won't cash the check.
I'm sure they'll start requiring ID just for your paranoid fantasies, though.
1) Ironically, the right tried to keep people here illegally from buying into the public option, and if they had done that, you actually would have to show ID to get that insurance Sadly, the public option was killed.
Because this story is from the Daily Mail.
American readers often are not aware that is England's rather right-wing version of the National Enquirer.
We have no evidence the kid was 'stuck' at all.
For all we know he simply didn't want to come in, and the school didn't force the issue (As attempting to pull someone out of a tree can, in fact, be dangerous.), but left him out there with someone keeping an eye on him out the window.