So if I understand the logic correctly here: I can set up a lemonade stand in the front of my house and give away free lemonade. I can collect information by passively observing the people who pick up one of these free lemonades (sex, race, vehicle, age, direction on the street they came from, etc). To keep with what you've said, I have a sign nearby that says "Free lemonade sponsored by Jack's Shrimp Shack" because my friend Jack kindly underwrote some of my costs. Then at some point I decide that my experiment is over and I pack up my lemonade stand and go home. Maybe it was too hot outside and I was bored. Someone has a court case against me because I stopped handing out something that was free, but not free, because I was collecting information and had a poster advertising a business?
No, because your side of the bargain is giving away a glass of lemonade. Once you've done that, and the customer is happy with their lemonade, the contract has been fulfilled on both sides. If you'd promised to provide lemonades every day at a particular time, you may have problems, depending on the terms of the contract.
AOL isn't selling a product, they're selling a service, and a promise to continue to provide that service for a specified time (in this case, I think the time limit is "until AOL decides to no longer provide the service").
1. Set up free gmail accounts (the more the better) 2. Wait for google to shut off the gmail beta 3. ??? 4. Sue Google 5. Profit!
Don't forget that you'd also have to show damages. If you opened a pile of e-mail accounts with the sole intention of suing google later, the judge wouldn't be too happy with you (and you'd have no damages, either).
You'd possibly be able to sue for damages arising from the loss of your genuine accounts, but again, it would depend on the terms of the TOS.
You're forgetting something very important: the law does not require that one party pay money for a contract to exist, only that there is some consideration. If AOL is providing a service for free, then you're correct. But if AOL is providing a service in exchange for showing you ads, or data-mining your surfing habits, then you are paying for the service and AOL is bound by the terms of the contract. If those terms include clauses stating that notice has to be given, then AOL has to give notice. If not, then the user is shit out of luck, should have bargained harder.
Courts are very leery of making judgments on the value of the consideration (the price you pay) preferring to let contracting parties work out how much of what is worth the service or good contracted for, so I'm pretty confident that a judge would find that exposure to advertizing or data-mining would constitute sufficient consideration.
Also, in contract law there is the notion of unconscionability, specifically that where one party to the contract is grossly more powerful than the other, the court can make decisions in favour of the less powerful party that would otherwise run afoul of contract law. True bargaining only occurs between equals, and the law has long recognized that.
It's this principle that is the source of the renter's protection laws that you despise so much. Tenants get these protections because they would otherwise be powerless against their landlords, who could impose terms with impunity (pay up, or I'll throw you out on the street! And no, I won't get rid of those cockroaches! Too expensive!). You may not like it when poorer tenants are protected against their landlords, but I bet you don't object so much when you want to return something you bought under warranty. Warranty and consumer protection laws derive from the same principle of law.
And lastly, if the cut-off of service wasn't mentioned at all in the TOS, the customers may have a remedy in tort for damages. The TOS would have to explicitly waive liability on cessation of service to exclude recovery in tort.
(note that of course, I am not a lawyer, this is not advice, blah blah blah.)
Also, didn't Microsoft already do this with Hotmail? I seem to recall them designing the hotmail site (and their own homepage) so that it was broken in any other browser than IE. And yes, there was a lot of rage about it back then, though it never came to much in the grander scheme of things.
Google are using their influence in one area (ad-supported email accounts) to promote their products in a different market (browsers) at cost to their rival's product. That's anti-trust.
No, it's not quite anti-trust, because Google doesn't have a monopoly in the "ad-supported email accounts" market, which is the requirement. Using your influence (really, market share) in one market to promote a product in another market is not in itself illegal.
A timely example of this (and a car analogy to boot) would be auto-makers who also have finance divisions that write car loans for their buyers. The particular car company is at an advantage, because they can lower the price of their cars to induce people to take out loans with them (or the other way around -- lower the loan rates to induce consumers to buy more cars). The practice is not illegal, because no one car company has a monopoly in the market, and a consumer can take their dollars (and/or their credit) to another automaker.
Similarly, users of Googlemail who want to continue using IE6 also have choices. They can switch to Hotmail, or Yahoo, or an e-mail service provided by their ISP, or they can roll their own server and use Outlook or Thunderbird or what-have-you.
The leverage google has, to make users switch from IE6 to another browser isn't that gmail is the only choice, but that it is (or is perceived by many to be) the best choice. Google is banking on the fact that loyal users of Gmail will give up their chosen browser, at whatever expense, and switch to Chrome (preferably) or Firefox.
There's nothing illegal about producing a superior product, and using that quality to force other, inferior competitors out of the market. It's the very essence of the free market, and even a lefty like me recognizes that this mechanism works well to increase the quality of the goods in the market (all other factors being equal).
And last of all, people need to remember that Microsoft, not Google is the convicted monopolist. It's a perfectly reasonable conclusion that Google is making a play to break the Microsoft monopoly on browsers, and if Google is doing what the DoJ won't do, then I say, hooray for Google (for now).
I think GP was saying that with the economy in the tank, fewer would-be customers are going to be upgrading their hardware, slowing the adoption of Windows 7.
I can't say whether the current versions are up to the quality you describe in 5.1, but I can say I preferred it to Word by a wide margin. I think for me it is the tag-based system that is the major selling point. Nothing beats being able to look at the tags when you're trying to figure out what's wrong with your document, and why it's not working.
As far as being placeholders for the legal profession, well I'm in the legal profession, so I guess my bias is a little skewed toward those features.
Well, I can't evaluate the whole suite, but Wordperfect is still on the market, and being updated, and it's a lot better than MS Word in any of its incarnations (though I do like the ribbon).
I would bet that it's a lot better than OO as well, but I haven't used that one in a few years. My sole gripe with WP is that it is not available for the Mac or Linux.
If I wanted to go through my system and customize all the settings manually, I'd install Linux. In a Windows OS, given its target market, having to go through it "menu by menu" and reconfigure it is disastrous.
In fact, as I recall, when WinME was out I did have Linux installed, and the default settings were mostly good enough, with only some tweaking required for one or two components (I think the audio cards weren't supported properly then). Clearly, ME was (for most users) a disaster.
My impression was that EEStor was also working on improving lithium-ion tech, and that was the technology that Zenn Cars has licensed. Note that Zenn Cars does not have any license agreement for uses in any other type of vehicle or any other application. For this, if it's real and feasible, there will be a huge market.
Would a government-owned news reporting company be more biased than what we have now?
That really depends on how the government decides to run it. It's simplistic to think that a government will always run things in the worst way possible, even if that is often the case. Ultimately, the question is, "Who is the government afraid of, and what does that person (or those people) want?" If the government is afraid of nobody, you get a propaganda arm. If the government is afraid of the voters, then you get what the voters want, whatever that may be.
Is the BBC worse than CNN or FOX News?
Absolutely not. The BBC is miles ahead of CNN or Fox News or, as far as I can tell, any other mainstream media outlet in the US. The Beeb is known for joyfully and viciously biting the hand that feeds it. The government doesn't like it, and often there are news stories about the gov threatening to pull funding, but I think (I don't live in Britain) that people just wouldn't tolerate it.
I watched the US Election coverage on the BBC (online stream) and the difference was amazing. It was also funny to see the American talking heads taking a beating when they got called on some of their more blatant departures from reality. They simply had no idea what it was like to be interviewed by an intelligent, skeptical person who wasn't prepared to swallow any bullshit. And the BBC people were actually being nice.
Government-paid television doesn't necessarily mean government-controlled television.
I think by "personal", more is meant than just appearing to come from your bank. The spammers seem to be getting hold of more personal details of people and targeting those people specifically.
As for online banking, I know that my banks send me e-mail that basically says "you have a statement/message/notice waiting, please log into your account and check it", and these e-mails generally do not even directly link to the bank's web page.
My banks all have excellent security, including original/customizable security questions, image keys, etc. Some require you to speak to an actual human before they'll reset a password. None of my banks offer cookies to save my password from one session to the next, and prevent the browser from offering to store the password locally.
In all, I would expect that if spammers are getting personalized information on me, they're not getting it from my banks.
Actually the Pinto incident with the exploding gas tanks turned on the fact that they did know that the design would result in a certain number of deaths, but that it would be cheaper to pay off the resultant law suits than it would be to implement the fix (which involved an $11 part, if memory serves). Of course, the public found out, and damages awards started skyrocketing, thanks to the punitives, so it looks like they mis-calculated, there.
So yes, I do think American car companies would design and sell a car with known (to them) issues, if it was cheaper to do so than to fix the issues. Certainly Ford has, in the past.
If a touchcreen can handle 50 words per minute typing, and is as comfortable as a keyboard..... maybe.
It's going to have to do a lot better than that. I, for one, am not willing to accept a 50% reduction in my typing speed, nor will anyone who touch-types reasonably well, as part of their job.
Maybe now that Bell can legally throttle its competitors, Bell now will throttle only its competitors, and not its own customers, giving it an unfair advantage in quality of service.
There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.
For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.
These are limitations imposed by local laws, customs, and physics, but not by an agreement with the manufacturer of the car.
Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.
Again, these are not limitations placed on you by the seller of the house, but other branches of the law. You still own your house, even if you can't run a brothel in it. You can sell it, take it down, build a replica of it somewhere else.
So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.
Well, no. If you don't have a license with the seller, then the seller cannot limit what you do with it; it's yours. There may be other laws governing the use (criminal laws preventing piracy, public viewings, etc) but these have nothing to do with the original seller.
The parent to my post was arguing that a buyer of DVD's is limited by license, which is patently false. No license applies.
So, though public viewings may be illegal, there is no law saying you can't resell the copy you own for example. You can show the movie to as many people as you want, in your own home. This wouldn't be true for licensed software, or presumably for licensed DVDs, if they existed.
The key distinction here is this: with a license, you have a contract with the rights-holder, that grants you privileges for a price. The contract is usually conditional; those rights can be taken away from you later, if you violate a term of the agreement.
A sale is a contract where the whole contract is done at the time of the purchase. The seller can't revoke the sale later.
Criminal or regulatory law (which is what you're talking about) is a "contract" between a government and the members of society being governed. If you break this contract (copying a DVD for example), the original seller doesn't necessarily have any direct recourse against you. The movie company doesn't generally get compensated when a commercial pirate gets busted (unless, of course, his lobbyist has purchased the necessary laws to enable that).
The movie distributor could sue you for damages, but they can't come and take the movie that you bought away from you, it's yours. They can't stop you from playing it. It's yours. For keeps. This is the difference between a sale of a good and a licensing scheme.
Where was the license agreement that he agreed to, when he purchased the movie player, and the disc? You actually have to "sign" an agreement to purchase a license, hence the click-through agreements on software (that are questionable anyway, as you have to make the agreement before you purchase the license, but that's another question).
When you buy a DVD and/or player (and presumably the same is true for Blu-Ray, never bought one) nobody asks you to sign an agreement, the dvd player doesn't make you click through an EULA before you can watch the disc. As far as I can tell, no licensing contract exists. The only contract that exists is the one made when money was exchanged for a good, which is a transfer of ownership. If that's the only contract, then the buyer owns the dvd and player, and can do what he damn well pleases with it.
I second this advice. I got just a taste of Logo when I was in grade 3, and then various flavours of basic until I finished high school. It was enough to get me into a computer science program at uni, but....well now I'm in law school. Draw your own conclusions.
I guess I just hoped he'd made a mistake or hadn't thought it through. I still hope that. The alternative, that he meant it literally, is pretty frightening.
If the prescription medicine actually cures the problem, that's fine. But if it's just pain relief, that's not okay. It's not right to turn people into junkies because the doctors don't have the balls to treat their patients properly.
I don't know the fact situation in your case, but I've seen many, many cases of people who would have gotten far more benefit from psychotherapy or anti-depressants than they could ever get from Oxycontin.
If I've got a debilitating problem (and guess what, I do) then I want it fixed, not papered over with palliatives. If it can't ever be fixed, then that's fine, out come the palliative meds.
Well actually, I wasn't really trying to point out anything to other readers, I was trying to maybe get the poster to see clearly that he was advocating genocide to solve the drug problem.
Even as hyperbole, (and I hope it was hyperbole, to think he was serious is, well, monstrous) it is disturbing to think that someone can suggest that the best way to get rid of junkies and hookers is to dispose of them in ovens. I wonder if b4upoo has any idea of just how horrible a genocide is? I wonder if villagers in Rwanda, if given a choice between the machete-weilding Interahamwe or some junkies and thieves and prostitutes, would consider for a second supporting the Interahamwe?
Anyway, that was my point. I wrote what I did because, honestly, I was floored by his post. I couldn't think of anything I could say that would be as eloquent as simply deconstructing his post. Anyway, I suppose I failed, which is common here on Slashdot for me, I don't often seem to get my point across. But in this issue...well in this case I had to say something.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I understand the logic correctly here: I can set up a lemonade stand in the front of my house and give away free lemonade. I can collect information by passively observing the people who pick up one of these free lemonades (sex, race, vehicle, age, direction on the street they came from, etc). To keep with what you've said, I have a sign nearby that says "Free lemonade sponsored by Jack's Shrimp Shack" because my friend Jack kindly underwrote some of my costs. Then at some point I decide that my experiment is over and I pack up my lemonade stand and go home. Maybe it was too hot outside and I was bored. Someone has a court case against me because I stopped handing out something that was free, but not free, because I was collecting information and had a poster advertising a business?
No, because your side of the bargain is giving away a glass of lemonade. Once you've done that, and the customer is happy with their lemonade, the contract has been fulfilled on both sides. If you'd promised to provide lemonades every day at a particular time, you may have problems, depending on the terms of the contract.
AOL isn't selling a product, they're selling a service, and a promise to continue to provide that service for a specified time (in this case, I think the time limit is "until AOL decides to no longer provide the service").
1. Set up free gmail accounts (the more the better)
2. Wait for google to shut off the gmail beta
3. ???
4. Sue Google
5. Profit!
Don't forget that you'd also have to show damages. If you opened a pile of e-mail accounts with the sole intention of suing google later, the judge wouldn't be too happy with you (and you'd have no damages, either).
You'd possibly be able to sue for damages arising from the loss of your genuine accounts, but again, it would depend on the terms of the TOS.
You're forgetting something very important: the law does not require that one party pay money for a contract to exist, only that there is some consideration. If AOL is providing a service for free, then you're correct. But if AOL is providing a service in exchange for showing you ads, or data-mining your surfing habits, then you are paying for the service and AOL is bound by the terms of the contract. If those terms include clauses stating that notice has to be given, then AOL has to give notice. If not, then the user is shit out of luck, should have bargained harder.
Courts are very leery of making judgments on the value of the consideration (the price you pay) preferring to let contracting parties work out how much of what is worth the service or good contracted for, so I'm pretty confident that a judge would find that exposure to advertizing or data-mining would constitute sufficient consideration.
Also, in contract law there is the notion of unconscionability, specifically that where one party to the contract is grossly more powerful than the other, the court can make decisions in favour of the less powerful party that would otherwise run afoul of contract law. True bargaining only occurs between equals, and the law has long recognized that.
It's this principle that is the source of the renter's protection laws that you despise so much. Tenants get these protections because they would otherwise be powerless against their landlords, who could impose terms with impunity (pay up, or I'll throw you out on the street! And no, I won't get rid of those cockroaches! Too expensive!). You may not like it when poorer tenants are protected against their landlords, but I bet you don't object so much when you want to return something you bought under warranty. Warranty and consumer protection laws derive from the same principle of law.
And lastly, if the cut-off of service wasn't mentioned at all in the TOS, the customers may have a remedy in tort for damages. The TOS would have to explicitly waive liability on cessation of service to exclude recovery in tort.
(note that of course, I am not a lawyer, this is not advice, blah blah blah.)
Fair enough, and I'm sorry if I was too pedantic.
Also, didn't Microsoft already do this with Hotmail? I seem to recall them designing the hotmail site (and their own homepage) so that it was broken in any other browser than IE. And yes, there was a lot of rage about it back then, though it never came to much in the grander scheme of things.
Google are using their influence in one area (ad-supported email accounts) to promote their products in a different market (browsers) at cost to their rival's product. That's anti-trust.
No, it's not quite anti-trust, because Google doesn't have a monopoly in the "ad-supported email accounts" market, which is the requirement. Using your influence (really, market share) in one market to promote a product in another market is not in itself illegal.
A timely example of this (and a car analogy to boot) would be auto-makers who also have finance divisions that write car loans for their buyers. The particular car company is at an advantage, because they can lower the price of their cars to induce people to take out loans with them (or the other way around -- lower the loan rates to induce consumers to buy more cars). The practice is not illegal, because no one car company has a monopoly in the market, and a consumer can take their dollars (and/or their credit) to another automaker.
Similarly, users of Googlemail who want to continue using IE6 also have choices. They can switch to Hotmail, or Yahoo, or an e-mail service provided by their ISP, or they can roll their own server and use Outlook or Thunderbird or what-have-you.
The leverage google has, to make users switch from IE6 to another browser isn't that gmail is the only choice, but that it is (or is perceived by many to be) the best choice. Google is banking on the fact that loyal users of Gmail will give up their chosen browser, at whatever expense, and switch to Chrome (preferably) or Firefox.
There's nothing illegal about producing a superior product, and using that quality to force other, inferior competitors out of the market. It's the very essence of the free market, and even a lefty like me recognizes that this mechanism works well to increase the quality of the goods in the market (all other factors being equal).
And last of all, people need to remember that Microsoft, not Google is the convicted monopolist. It's a perfectly reasonable conclusion that Google is making a play to break the Microsoft monopoly on browsers, and if Google is doing what the DoJ won't do, then I say, hooray for Google (for now).
I think GP was saying that with the economy in the tank, fewer would-be customers are going to be upgrading their hardware, slowing the adoption of Windows 7.
I can't say whether the current versions are up to the quality you describe in 5.1, but I can say I preferred it to Word by a wide margin. I think for me it is the tag-based system that is the major selling point. Nothing beats being able to look at the tags when you're trying to figure out what's wrong with your document, and why it's not working.
As far as being placeholders for the legal profession, well I'm in the legal profession, so I guess my bias is a little skewed toward those features.
Up until very recently, I worked in an office that uses Wordperfect, and I have to say that it's worth the (small) hassle to stick with it.
Well, I can't evaluate the whole suite, but Wordperfect is still on the market, and being updated, and it's a lot better than MS Word in any of its incarnations (though I do like the ribbon).
I would bet that it's a lot better than OO as well, but I haven't used that one in a few years. My sole gripe with WP is that it is not available for the Mac or Linux.
I suspect that there's a lot of overlap in your "Collective efforts" section...but a worthy start nonetheless
Except we can't add you to the list, as you're an anonymous coward.
Nah, those arrogant sons of bitches will never learn respect for anyone or anything.
Time will inevitably bring change, even to Microsoft. Their monopoly can't last forever. /platitude
If I wanted to go through my system and customize all the settings manually, I'd install Linux. In a Windows OS, given its target market, having to go through it "menu by menu" and reconfigure it is disastrous.
In fact, as I recall, when WinME was out I did have Linux installed, and the default settings were mostly good enough, with only some tweaking required for one or two components (I think the audio cards weren't supported properly then). Clearly, ME was (for most users) a disaster.
My impression was that EEStor was also working on improving lithium-ion tech, and that was the technology that Zenn Cars has licensed. Note that Zenn Cars does not have any license agreement for uses in any other type of vehicle or any other application. For this, if it's real and feasible, there will be a huge market.
Would a government-owned news reporting company be more biased than what we have now?
That really depends on how the government decides to run it. It's simplistic to think that a government will always run things in the worst way possible, even if that is often the case. Ultimately, the question is, "Who is the government afraid of, and what does that person (or those people) want?" If the government is afraid of nobody, you get a propaganda arm. If the government is afraid of the voters, then you get what the voters want, whatever that may be.
Is the BBC worse than CNN or FOX News?
Absolutely not. The BBC is miles ahead of CNN or Fox News or, as far as I can tell, any other mainstream media outlet in the US. The Beeb is known for joyfully and viciously biting the hand that feeds it. The government doesn't like it, and often there are news stories about the gov threatening to pull funding, but I think (I don't live in Britain) that people just wouldn't tolerate it.
I watched the US Election coverage on the BBC (online stream) and the difference was amazing. It was also funny to see the American talking heads taking a beating when they got called on some of their more blatant departures from reality. They simply had no idea what it was like to be interviewed by an intelligent, skeptical person who wasn't prepared to swallow any bullshit. And the BBC people were actually being nice.
Government-paid television doesn't necessarily mean government-controlled television.
I think by "personal", more is meant than just appearing to come from your bank. The spammers seem to be getting hold of more personal details of people and targeting those people specifically.
As for online banking, I know that my banks send me e-mail that basically says "you have a statement/message/notice waiting, please log into your account and check it", and these e-mails generally do not even directly link to the bank's web page.
My banks all have excellent security, including original/customizable security questions, image keys, etc. Some require you to speak to an actual human before they'll reset a password. None of my banks offer cookies to save my password from one session to the next, and prevent the browser from offering to store the password locally.
In all, I would expect that if spammers are getting personalized information on me, they're not getting it from my banks.
Actually the Pinto incident with the exploding gas tanks turned on the fact that they did know that the design would result in a certain number of deaths, but that it would be cheaper to pay off the resultant law suits than it would be to implement the fix (which involved an $11 part, if memory serves). Of course, the public found out, and damages awards started skyrocketing, thanks to the punitives, so it looks like they mis-calculated, there.
So yes, I do think American car companies would design and sell a car with known (to them) issues, if it was cheaper to do so than to fix the issues. Certainly Ford has, in the past.
If a touchcreen can handle 50 words per minute typing, and is as comfortable as a keyboard..... maybe.
It's going to have to do a lot better than that. I, for one, am not willing to accept a 50% reduction in my typing speed, nor will anyone who touch-types reasonably well, as part of their job.
Maybe now that Bell can legally throttle its competitors, Bell now will throttle only its competitors, and not its own customers, giving it an unfair advantage in quality of service.
There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.
For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.
These are limitations imposed by local laws, customs, and physics, but not by an agreement with the manufacturer of the car.
Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.
Again, these are not limitations placed on you by the seller of the house, but other branches of the law. You still own your house, even if you can't run a brothel in it. You can sell it, take it down, build a replica of it somewhere else.
So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.
Well, no. If you don't have a license with the seller, then the seller cannot limit what you do with it; it's yours. There may be other laws governing the use (criminal laws preventing piracy, public viewings, etc) but these have nothing to do with the original seller.
The parent to my post was arguing that a buyer of DVD's is limited by license, which is patently false. No license applies.
So, though public viewings may be illegal, there is no law saying you can't resell the copy you own for example. You can show the movie to as many people as you want, in your own home. This wouldn't be true for licensed software, or presumably for licensed DVDs, if they existed.
The key distinction here is this: with a license, you have a contract with the rights-holder, that grants you privileges for a price. The contract is usually conditional; those rights can be taken away from you later, if you violate a term of the agreement.
A sale is a contract where the whole contract is done at the time of the purchase. The seller can't revoke the sale later.
Criminal or regulatory law (which is what you're talking about) is a "contract" between a government and the members of society being governed. If you break this contract (copying a DVD for example), the original seller doesn't necessarily have any direct recourse against you. The movie company doesn't generally get compensated when a commercial pirate gets busted (unless, of course, his lobbyist has purchased the necessary laws to enable that).
The movie distributor could sue you for damages, but they can't come and take the movie that you bought away from you, it's yours. They can't stop you from playing it. It's yours. For keeps. This is the difference between a sale of a good and a licensing scheme.
Well, yes. Sadly, not everywhere.
Where was the license agreement that he agreed to, when he purchased the movie player, and the disc? You actually have to "sign" an agreement to purchase a license, hence the click-through agreements on software (that are questionable anyway, as you have to make the agreement before you purchase the license, but that's another question).
When you buy a DVD and/or player (and presumably the same is true for Blu-Ray, never bought one) nobody asks you to sign an agreement, the dvd player doesn't make you click through an EULA before you can watch the disc. As far as I can tell, no licensing contract exists. The only contract that exists is the one made when money was exchanged for a good, which is a transfer of ownership. If that's the only contract, then the buyer owns the dvd and player, and can do what he damn well pleases with it.
I second this advice. I got just a taste of Logo when I was in grade 3, and then various flavours of basic until I finished high school. It was enough to get me into a computer science program at uni, but....well now I'm in law school. Draw your own conclusions.
YMMV, anecdote =/= evidence, yeah yeah yeah.
I guess I just hoped he'd made a mistake or hadn't thought it through. I still hope that. The alternative, that he meant it literally, is pretty frightening.
If the prescription medicine actually cures the problem, that's fine. But if it's just pain relief, that's not okay. It's not right to turn people into junkies because the doctors don't have the balls to treat their patients properly.
I don't know the fact situation in your case, but I've seen many, many cases of people who would have gotten far more benefit from psychotherapy or anti-depressants than they could ever get from Oxycontin.
If I've got a debilitating problem (and guess what, I do) then I want it fixed, not papered over with palliatives. If it can't ever be fixed, then that's fine, out come the palliative meds.
Well actually, I wasn't really trying to point out anything to other readers, I was trying to maybe get the poster to see clearly that he was advocating genocide to solve the drug problem.
Even as hyperbole, (and I hope it was hyperbole, to think he was serious is, well, monstrous) it is disturbing to think that someone can suggest that the best way to get rid of junkies and hookers is to dispose of them in ovens. I wonder if b4upoo has any idea of just how horrible a genocide is? I wonder if villagers in Rwanda, if given a choice between the machete-weilding Interahamwe or some junkies and thieves and prostitutes, would consider for a second supporting the Interahamwe?
Anyway, that was my point. I wrote what I did because, honestly, I was floored by his post. I couldn't think of anything I could say that would be as eloquent as simply deconstructing his post. Anyway, I suppose I failed, which is common here on Slashdot for me, I don't often seem to get my point across. But in this issue...well in this case I had to say something.