In case you were looking for more reasons to hate ASCAP, there's this article about Skip's Tavern here in San Francisco. It's a bar that has live music, with bands who play only original songs. ASCAP came to them and said, "you have bands, and so they must be playing songs on which ASCAP controls the copyright! Pay us $800/year." The bar owner asked for evidence that there was any copyright infringement; in response, ASCAP sued him. They were unwilling to negotiate, so in response, he's no longer doing live music at all.
I got the smallest of the small Sharp Actius laptops and they pre-loaded it with Debian Linux at my request. They don't just slap a Linux distro on and push it out the door, they make sure everything works as advertised, customizing whatever they need to to make sure it does. The modem works! Software suspend works!
The model I got comes with a really small battery, and I bought an optional larger battery that has more life, but has a big buldge in it.
The unit itself has no removeable disk drives -- everything is attached via USB. It comes with a docking station which allows the laptop to be used as a USB hard drive while it's powered off. Way cool.
EmperorLinux provides a detailed manual on making the most of your laptop through the Linux environment. But enough about the geek stuff.
The most important thing of all: when I pull this baby out at Starbucks, the chicks all turn their heads. A Dell doesn't do that. A Titanium Powerbook doesn't do that (anymore).
The e-mails during the 35 weeks that negotiations were held mysteriously disappeared. In court Microsoft claimed the e-mails were erased from employee's desktops, e-mail servers and server backups. The technology was not interesting to Microsoft, lawyers insisted, so the electronic trail of communications was erased.
If you learn something under NDA and want to make sure you don't break it, one way of doing that is to forget everything you learned.
Companies don't have conscious memory, but they do contain information, and destroying the information is a way of making the company itself forget, as much as that word can apply to a corporation.
Not the most unreasonable way of doing it, but I'm sure there are standard practices that do a much better job of ensuring you don't taint yourself with someone else's IP.
Do you have any idea how serious perjury is? The punishment of perjury is SEVERE, much worse than just refusing to testify and being held in contempt of court.
How can you stick someone with perjury if they don't actually admit that they lied?
Lets say that the journalist is compelled to testify. "I'm sorry, I can't tell you anything about the source. I just don't remember. I do not recall. I don't remember. I would answer if I knew. Sorry. It might come back to me some day. Gosh, I'm such a dumbass."
Exactly how is a court supposed to prove that he really doesn't remember right now? Last I checked, it's technically impossible to see what's going on in someone's mind. If I can commit perjury just because I honestly don't remember something, I'm never going anywhere near a courtroom.
There is no constitutional right to "mind one's own business".
How do you tell the difference between someone refusing to answer because they have a right not to incriminate themselves, and someone refusing to answer because they don't want to name their source?
Plaintiff: Tell us what you know!
Defendant: No
Judge: I order you to tell us what you know
Defendant: It was me:(
Judge: GUILTY!
If you could listen to any song you wanted to, in the world, at the exact instant you typed it in or selected it from a list, for only 5 cents, would you even bother to store it on your hard disk?
Music to listen to at work under this model would cost me approximately $5/day. At a price like that, I'm not sure I'd ever save and manage anything locally. I'd gladly pay it to avoid the annoyance of babysitting soulseek all day.
Now, I'd probably want some kind of recently-listened-to cache so that I won't be re-charged for listening to something that I wanted to hear again, but there's no reason to fill my disks up with hundreds of gigs of music when it's so darn cheap. Heck, at that rate, why would you even bother to share it? The for-pay version has a reason to give you fast, direct, convenient as possible access to the music whereas some P2P app is going to suck by comparisen.
Plus, under this model, it'd be so easy to directly compensate the artists that are listened to. And since everyone can put their music out there, the playing field levels. Sure, you'll still have pop icons that are well marketed and popular, but their segment of the market will narrow as choice explodes.
With such unlimited music out there, the problem isn't one of getting what you want to listen to, but figuring out what you want to hear next. Maybe you'd subscribe to playlists. People would become famous just because they can keep an interesting set of music coming through your speakers. Fuck the radio.
Quick summary: an enormous chunk of programmers write code that no one outside of their respective companies sets eyes on. These people routinely integrate open source code into their projects and also contribute back to it in code, feedback, financing, hiring consultants, etc. It's an integral part of, to use Microsoft's terms, the software ecosystem.
Open source already dominates the software service market. Conquering the software product market would be swell, but getting Joe Sixpack to run some form of Linux sure isn't my perogative right now.
One of my programmers was fighting an algorithm for the better part of a week. I told him to shut down the editor and write the comments first. He did -- and a moment's code-brain disconnect did the trick. After that little exercise he completed the function in about 15 minutes. Good coding practice or good psychology? Go figure. It ain't an exclusive-or.
Out of curiousity, what was this monster impossible algorithm?/p>
If the expression itself requires a comment, then it is not being expressed clearly enough. It should be rewritten.
If the expression is clear, but does not make sense in the context, appears suboptimal, or otherwise thwarts the reader's expectations, THEN I'll comment.
Real world project comments...
We're using this byte[] array wrapper because Java won't hash identical byte arrays to the same value.
This is in fact a bubble sort. I'd call qsort(), but it's nowhere to be found and I'm not going to implement it myself just for this. Additionally, it doesn't matter since it sorts at most 100 records, and it's called very rarely.
Why yes, it IS a giant waste of space to represent an 8-bit value in a 16-bit quantity. But someone thought it was a good idea to leave out unsigned.
Unlike everywhere else, here we're waiting for key-release instead of key-press because the operating environment has a race condition and posts them out of order! Go Sun!
Re:Everyone knew it would happen..
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 1
Corporations were formed squarely to be immune officers from litigation. I do not know if this is still true but it was an early loophole in the 19th century.
Judgements against a corporation can only seize assets that are owned by the corporation.
An owner of this corporation is not usually personally liable for the corporation's debts.
This does not immunize any individuals representing or owning the corporation from any crime, civil or criminal. They may claim that they did it in carrying out the will of the corporation, and are not to be held personally liable, but this is for a judge to decide.
Anyway, it's irrelevant. One set of shareholders (McBride and friends) defrauded other SCO shareholders.
Or, put another way, IBM, DC, Autozone get to fight over the tattered remains of SCO, while the shareholders that McBride screwed over get to fight over all of his personal property.
In theory.
Re:Everyone knew it would happen..
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is out-and-out-fraud.
Granted, stockholders want to sue for damages whenever their shareholder value goes down, whatever the reason, but this is not a simple case of the market going sour.
Here's a company with a stable but not so very exciting future ahead.
Along come some executives who decide to sacrifice the stable future on a gamble and steer the company into a legal battle with highly dubious claims (on the order of a million to one that this will go favorably). They know this, their advisors know this, industry insiders know this, but that still doesn't stop them from hiring the most popular law firm possible, and launch an intensive PR campaign blitz to pretend that this is all legit.
The blitz momentarily convinces the market that the claim has merit, and before any of the bullshit can get debunked, the executives and the law firm have all cashed their chips and are left playing house and putting on a face to the remaining shareholders while it all goes flaming down the toilet.
Oh, hey, but David Boies & Family did their due dilligence right? The case had to have merit at some point for them to take it? Otherwise, you know, they could be disbarred!
Well, that might be believable if they didn't stand to gain from this charade too, the bastards took payment in stock.
I expect the pending shareholder suit will name Boies
If this isn't fraud, I'll... just sit here and keep whining on Slashdot.
Hey! The Republicans probably have a bone to pick with David Boies, what with representing Gore and all in the 2000 election dispute. This SCO thing would be a great way for them to pretend to be punishing Wall Street greed while getting back at an old foe.
I'll write my Congressman.
Re:Has anyone managed to short SCO stock?
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 1
Incidentally, the money to be made shorting SCOX / SCOXE has already been made. There's not much more room left for the stock to go down.
Thank you for the helpful explanation. I suspected it was something like this for larger transactions, but wondered if market makers could provide some kind of virtual liquidity for wannabe big-shot daytraders (I wasn't planning to risk more than some change on it.)
Re:Everyone knew it would happen..
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
At this point they're probably running company affairs from their yachts, and when it implodes, so what? Won't hurt them at all, and in a year or two they'll be hired on by some other group of corporate leeches and they'll drain another company dry.
If I were dumb enough to hold SCO stock until the bitter end, I would be pretty embarassed, and litigious.
Don't the execs face severe legal punishment for this?
Has anyone managed to short SCO stock?
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been trying since they were nearly $20/share but my broker said something about it not being available. Did Wall Street see them as being full of shit, too?
Similarly, often the business press claims that Microsoft is a successful company. But would Microsoft have been successful if it had not had a very unusual situation in which it was able to arrange a virtual monopoly by breaking the antitrust law? Someone who had a monopoly on water, for example, could make Bill Gates look like a poor man in a week.
Gates & Co saw value in software where everyone thought it was in hardware.
Software developers were targetting individual computer makes, if not individual models. Sure, good developers could target multiple platforms, but it was more expensive and most developers are lazy. Gates convinced the lazy developers to target a single platform *software* OS and Windows.
IBM was blind to this, and lost. Big. Gates got lucky, but luck comes more easily to the prepared.
I prefer buying CDs. But CDs can only be found in specific stores. Furthermore, they usually don't have the CDs I want, so then I have to special order them (from the store, or cdnow, etc). They take DAYS to arrive! What is this, 1980!?
Hey! The internet will save me! I can download music! Oh, but the popular site won't let me do things that any normal user wants to do, like transfer music between devices without interfering. What a pain in the ass.
But wait! I can download them with a P2P app!
So long as I feel like babysitting downloads all day long. Or waiting a few days for them to come in. At that point I could've just ordered the freakin' CD.
Price has nothing to do with it, music is an inconvenient thing to have no matter how it's priced.
Lately I've just been playing shoutcast streams, but internet radio doesn't quite cut it when you know exactly what you want to listen to.
*sigh*
I'd probably be an allofmp3 fanatic since they offer a lot of different stuff without copy control restrictions, but their frontend is way too slow.
I just posted an article that's been sitting around on my hard disk for awhile now (I'm testing out nanoblogger). It's about how I'd improve LAMP, but it ended up becoming an advertisement for FreeBSD.
Have a look if you can stand an honest critique of Linux (I love and run Linux on everything, so don't accuse me of FreeBSD shilling).
in my head I think "if not pointer" which I interpret as not pointing to anything. When I read
if (ptr==NULL)
in my head I think "if pointer equals null" which I interpret the same way. As a result, I end up writing the former because it consumes less ocular and mental bandwidth.
Software companies, feel free to use in your own products. Released into the public domain.
----
YOUR_COMPANY_NAME_HERE ("Company") makes this copy of NAME_OF_YOUR_SOFTWARE_PRODUCT ("Software") available to you ("Licensee") under terms of this End User License Agreement ("EULA"). By installing software you agree to be bound by the terms contained herein.
LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
Company makes no guarantee of any kind, and waives all implied warranties including mercantibility and fitness for a particular purpose. Company shall not be held liable for any damage, personal injury, deaths, loss of profits, growth of additional organs, or any other injury or debt suffered by licensee due to any negligence, fraud, or other criminal or civil breach of contract or law committed by company. Licensee will hold company harmless under all circumstances in perpetuity.
PARTICIPATION IN GAINS
Company shall participate in the profits, advantages, or other benefits that the licensee experiences as a result of installing, using, or otherwise having anything to do with software no matter how remote or mundane. Company reserves the right to inspect the records of licensees business, premises, or person at any time for any reason to determine if it is entitled to a share of licensee's gains.
GRANTING OF ALL RIGHTS
Licensee gives software and company the right to do do anything it wants to your property or person for any reason. See limitation of liability and participation in gains for more information.
SEVERABILITY
Should a court of any kind find any part of this agreement unenforceable, the remainder of the agreement shall still have full force and effect.
IMMUNITY FROM LAW
No court shall have the power to enforce any of these provisions against the company, but shall have unlimited power to enforce any provision against the licensee. Licensee accepts the jurisdiction of any court.
RECOVERY OF FEES
Licensee must reimburse company for all enforcement fees incurred as a result of any action, in addition to paying a $100,000,000 penalty to the company, whether or not its action is justified.
GOOD FAITH AND DUE CONSIDERATION
Licensee declines any due consideration in accepting this EULA. Licensee accepts this agreement in good faith and verifies that they have read it and understood it in its entirety even if they just scrolled to the end and clicked OK without so much as glancing at it.
RESTRICTIONS ON REDISTRIBUTION
Licensee may not redistribute software in any way. Licensee may not format shift or space shift this software. Licensee waives all fair use rights, including the right to make a backup copy. Backup copies may be purchased from company for a (large) fee.
RESTRICTIONS ON USE
Licensee can only use the software for its intended purposes. We'll let you know what its intended purpose is when we catch you doing it and bring costly legal action against you.
Licensee must discontinue use of software and upgrade when company decides software has reached its end of life.
REVERSE ENGINEERING
Don't even think about it unless you've got really deep pockets so we can sue you for everything.
...copy of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month so he can figure out why the code he wrote years ago isn't being used.
Hint: Get the payroll sheet of an established software product company. Count up the number of programmers on the sheet. Also ask the programmers how much of their time is spent typing code. Put your findings into the context of the overall company. Solve for X.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about advertising, it's about function. Guns are for killing. If they were for target practice, they wouldn't be lethal.
Killing can be an offensive or a defense measure. Is defense illegal?
A 3 month long Java class?
I think I'd shoot myself.
Don't be so sure of that.
From DNA Lounge blog:
I'm confident that even Microsoft could have done a better job than Sun. THAT's what Mono has to offer.
Once I learned that Java didn't have unsigned data types, it was all downhill from there.
I got the smallest of the small Sharp Actius laptops and they pre-loaded it with Debian Linux at my request. They don't just slap a Linux distro on and push it out the door, they make sure everything works as advertised, customizing whatever they need to to make sure it does. The modem works! Software suspend works!
The model I got comes with a really small battery, and I bought an optional larger battery that has more life, but has a big buldge in it. The unit itself has no removeable disk drives -- everything is attached via USB. It comes with a docking station which allows the laptop to be used as a USB hard drive while it's powered off. Way cool.
EmperorLinux provides a detailed manual on making the most of your laptop through the Linux environment. But enough about the geek stuff.
The most important thing of all: when I pull this baby out at Starbucks, the chicks all turn their heads. A Dell doesn't do that. A Titanium Powerbook doesn't do that (anymore).
Score!
The e-mails during the 35 weeks that negotiations were held mysteriously disappeared. In court Microsoft claimed the e-mails were erased from employee's desktops, e-mail servers and server backups. The technology was not interesting to Microsoft, lawyers insisted, so the electronic trail of communications was erased.
If you learn something under NDA and want to make sure you don't break it, one way of doing that is to forget everything you learned.
Companies don't have conscious memory, but they do contain information, and destroying the information is a way of making the company itself forget, as much as that word can apply to a corporation.
Not the most unreasonable way of doing it, but I'm sure there are standard practices that do a much better job of ensuring you don't taint yourself with someone else's IP.
Do you have any idea how serious perjury is? The punishment of perjury is SEVERE, much worse than just refusing to testify and being held in contempt of court.
How can you stick someone with perjury if they don't actually admit that they lied?
Lets say that the journalist is compelled to testify. "I'm sorry, I can't tell you anything about the source. I just don't remember. I do not recall. I don't remember. I would answer if I knew. Sorry. It might come back to me some day. Gosh, I'm such a dumbass."
Exactly how is a court supposed to prove that he really doesn't remember right now? Last I checked, it's technically impossible to see what's going on in someone's mind. If I can commit perjury just because I honestly don't remember something, I'm never going anywhere near a courtroom.
There is no constitutional right to "mind one's own business".
How do you tell the difference between someone refusing to answer because they have a right not to incriminate themselves, and someone refusing to answer because they don't want to name their source?
Plaintiff: Tell us what you know! :(
Defendant: No
Judge: I order you to tell us what you know
Defendant: It was me
Judge: GUILTY!
If you could listen to any song you wanted to, in the world, at the exact instant you typed it in or selected it from a list, for only 5 cents, would you even bother to store it on your hard disk?
Music to listen to at work under this model would cost me approximately $5/day. At a price like that, I'm not sure I'd ever save and manage anything locally. I'd gladly pay it to avoid the annoyance of babysitting soulseek all day.
Now, I'd probably want some kind of recently-listened-to cache so that I won't be re-charged for listening to something that I wanted to hear again, but there's no reason to fill my disks up with hundreds of gigs of music when it's so darn cheap. Heck, at that rate, why would you even bother to share it? The for-pay version has a reason to give you fast, direct, convenient as possible access to the music whereas some P2P app is going to suck by comparisen.
Plus, under this model, it'd be so easy to directly compensate the artists that are listened to. And since everyone can put their music out there, the playing field levels. Sure, you'll still have pop icons that are well marketed and popular, but their segment of the market will narrow as choice explodes.
With such unlimited music out there, the problem isn't one of getting what you want to listen to, but figuring out what you want to hear next. Maybe you'd subscribe to playlists. People would become famous just because they can keep an interesting set of music coming through your speakers. Fuck the radio.
Quick summary: an enormous chunk of programmers write code that no one outside of their respective companies sets eyes on. These people routinely integrate open source code into their projects and also contribute back to it in code, feedback, financing, hiring consultants, etc. It's an integral part of, to use Microsoft's terms, the software ecosystem.
Open source already dominates the software service market. Conquering the software product market would be swell, but getting Joe Sixpack to run some form of Linux sure isn't my perogative right now.
One of my programmers was fighting an algorithm for the better part of a week. I told him to shut down the editor and write the comments first. He did -- and a moment's code-brain disconnect did the trick. After that little exercise he completed the function in about 15 minutes. Good coding practice or good psychology? Go figure. It ain't an exclusive-or.
Out of curiousity, what was this monster impossible algorithm?/p>
If the expression itself requires a comment, then it is not being expressed clearly enough. It should be rewritten.
If the expression is clear, but does not make sense in the context, appears suboptimal, or otherwise thwarts the reader's expectations, THEN I'll comment.
Real world project comments...
Corporations were formed squarely to be immune officers from litigation. I do not know if this is still true but it was an early loophole in the 19th century.
Judgements against a corporation can only seize assets that are owned by the corporation.
An owner of this corporation is not usually personally liable for the corporation's debts.
This does not immunize any individuals representing or owning the corporation from any crime, civil or criminal. They may claim that they did it in carrying out the will of the corporation, and are not to be held personally liable, but this is for a judge to decide.
Anyway, it's irrelevant. One set of shareholders (McBride and friends) defrauded other SCO shareholders.
Or, put another way, IBM, DC, Autozone get to fight over the tattered remains of SCO, while the shareholders that McBride screwed over get to fight over all of his personal property.
In theory.
This is out-and-out-fraud.
Granted, stockholders want to sue for damages whenever their shareholder value goes down, whatever the reason, but this is not a simple case of the market going sour.
Here's a company with a stable but not so very exciting future ahead.
Along come some executives who decide to sacrifice the stable future on a gamble and steer the company into a legal battle with highly dubious claims (on the order of a million to one that this will go favorably). They know this, their advisors know this, industry insiders know this, but that still doesn't stop them from hiring the most popular law firm possible, and launch an intensive PR campaign blitz to pretend that this is all legit.
The blitz momentarily convinces the market that the claim has merit, and before any of the bullshit can get debunked, the executives and the law firm have all cashed their chips and are left playing house and putting on a face to the remaining shareholders while it all goes flaming down the toilet.
Oh, hey, but David Boies & Family did their due dilligence right? The case had to have merit at some point for them to take it? Otherwise, you know, they could be disbarred!
Well, that might be believable if they didn't stand to gain from this charade too, the bastards took payment in stock.
I expect the pending shareholder suit will name Boies
If this isn't fraud, I'll... just sit here and keep whining on Slashdot.
Hey! The Republicans probably have a bone to pick with David Boies, what with representing Gore and all in the 2000 election dispute. This SCO thing would be a great way for them to pretend to be punishing Wall Street greed while getting back at an old foe.
I'll write my Congressman.
Incidentally, the money to be made shorting SCOX / SCOXE has already been made. There's not much more room left for the stock to go down.
Thank you for the helpful explanation. I suspected it was something like this for larger transactions, but wondered if market makers could provide some kind of virtual liquidity for wannabe big-shot daytraders (I wasn't planning to risk more than some change on it.)
At this point they're probably running company affairs from their yachts, and when it implodes, so what? Won't hurt them at all, and in a year or two they'll be hired on by some other group of corporate leeches and they'll drain another company dry.
If I were dumb enough to hold SCO stock until the bitter end, I would be pretty embarassed, and litigious.
Don't the execs face severe legal punishment for this?
I've been trying since they were nearly $20/share but my broker said something about it not being available. Did Wall Street see them as being full of shit, too?
Similarly, often the business press claims that Microsoft is a successful company. But would Microsoft have been successful if it had not had a very unusual situation in which it was able to arrange a virtual monopoly by breaking the antitrust law? Someone who had a monopoly on water, for example, could make Bill Gates look like a poor man in a week.
Gates & Co saw value in software where everyone thought it was in hardware.
Software developers were targetting individual computer makes, if not individual models. Sure, good developers could target multiple platforms, but it was more expensive and most developers are lazy. Gates convinced the lazy developers to target a single platform *software* OS and Windows.
IBM was blind to this, and lost. Big. Gates got lucky, but luck comes more easily to the prepared.
In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off-- what are they going to hear?
E1M1
I prefer buying CDs. But CDs can only be found in specific stores. Furthermore, they usually don't have the CDs I want, so then I have to special order them (from the store, or cdnow, etc). They take DAYS to arrive! What is this, 1980!?
Hey! The internet will save me! I can download music! Oh, but the popular site won't let me do things that any normal user wants to do, like transfer music between devices without interfering. What a pain in the ass.
But wait! I can download them with a P2P app! So long as I feel like babysitting downloads all day long. Or waiting a few days for them to come in. At that point I could've just ordered the freakin' CD.
Price has nothing to do with it, music is an inconvenient thing to have no matter how it's priced.
Lately I've just been playing shoutcast streams, but internet radio doesn't quite cut it when you know exactly what you want to listen to.
*sigh*
I'd probably be an allofmp3 fanatic since they offer a lot of different stuff without copy control restrictions, but their frontend is way too slow.
Won't capitalism please think of me?
I just posted an article that's been sitting around on my hard disk for awhile now (I'm testing out nanoblogger). It's about how I'd improve LAMP, but it ended up becoming an advertisement for FreeBSD.
Have a look if you can stand an honest critique of Linux (I love and run Linux on everything, so don't accuse me of FreeBSD shilling).
All mail clients suck, mutt just sucks the least.
When I read
if (!ptr)
in my head I think "if not pointer" which I interpret as not pointing to anything. When I read
if (ptr==NULL)
in my head I think "if pointer equals null" which I interpret the same way. As a result, I end up writing the former because it consumes less ocular and mental bandwidth.
Software companies, feel free to use in your own products. Released into the public domain.
----
YOUR_COMPANY_NAME_HERE ("Company") makes this copy of NAME_OF_YOUR_SOFTWARE_PRODUCT ("Software") available to you ("Licensee") under terms of this End User License Agreement ("EULA"). By installing software you agree to be bound by the terms contained herein.
LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
Company makes no guarantee of any kind, and waives all implied warranties including mercantibility and fitness for a particular purpose. Company shall not be held liable for any damage, personal injury, deaths, loss of profits, growth of additional organs, or any other injury or debt suffered by licensee due to any negligence, fraud, or other criminal or civil breach of contract or law committed by company. Licensee will hold company harmless under all circumstances in perpetuity.
PARTICIPATION IN GAINS
Company shall participate in the profits, advantages, or other benefits that the licensee experiences as a result of installing, using, or otherwise having anything to do with software no matter how remote or mundane. Company reserves the right to inspect the records of licensees business, premises, or person at any time for any reason to determine if it is entitled to a share of licensee's gains.
GRANTING OF ALL RIGHTS
Licensee gives software and company the right to do do anything it wants to your property or person for any reason. See limitation of liability and participation in gains for more information.
SEVERABILITY
Should a court of any kind find any part of this agreement unenforceable, the remainder of the agreement shall still have full force and effect.
IMMUNITY FROM LAW
No court shall have the power to enforce any of these provisions against the company, but shall have unlimited power to enforce any provision against the licensee. Licensee accepts the jurisdiction of any court.
RECOVERY OF FEES
Licensee must reimburse company for all enforcement fees incurred as a result of any action, in addition to paying a $100,000,000 penalty to the company, whether or not its action is justified.
GOOD FAITH AND DUE CONSIDERATION
Licensee declines any due consideration in accepting this EULA. Licensee accepts this agreement in good faith and verifies that they have read it and understood it in its entirety even if they just scrolled to the end and clicked OK without so much as glancing at it.
RESTRICTIONS ON REDISTRIBUTION
Licensee may not redistribute software in any way. Licensee may not format shift or space shift this software. Licensee waives all fair use rights, including the right to make a backup copy. Backup copies may be purchased from company for a (large) fee.
RESTRICTIONS ON USE
Licensee can only use the software for its intended purposes. We'll let you know what its intended purpose is when we catch you doing it and bring costly legal action against you.
Licensee must discontinue use of software and upgrade when company decides software has reached its end of life.
REVERSE ENGINEERING
Don't even think about it unless you've got really deep pockets so we can sue you for everything.
...copy of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month so he can figure out why the code he wrote years ago isn't being used.
Hint: Get the payroll sheet of an established software product company. Count up the number of programmers on the sheet. Also ask the programmers how much of their time is spent typing code. Put your findings into the context of the overall company. Solve for X.