"Wait for the store to transfer the case to regular court. Amend your suit to include legal fees and triple damages for being an ass, offering to settle for the original purchase price plus legal fees incurred so far all the while, so the judge knows you aren't being an ass."
I don't know about other jurisdictions, but Ontario requires that claims under $10,000 be resolved in Small Claims Court. Because the courts are for all people, and your government cares.
Suing to return your software is very easy, but almost certainly not worth the effort for each individual consumer.
This is what class actions are for. Of course, if you're going to do a class action, you're far better off suing the software company that drafted the oppressive EULA in the first place. Or filing a complaint for anti-competitive practices.
There are ways to fight abusive big businesses, but personal law suits are rarely the answer.
People are untrustworthy, so if you are robbed, it's your fault for carrying cash.
People expect benchmarks to have "sales puff" in them, so they know to greet the comparisons with a grain of salt.
People expect city streets to have churlish thugs in them, so they know to greet the robbers with a grain of assault.:)
People are killed every day, so I don't see what the big deal with Iraq is.
Now that's just silly. If I know that I'm in a spot with inflated death totals, I just need to take some extra lives with me. Death is just another marketing scam from the Wintel conspiracy.
Hmm. This never occurred to me before. Ironically, the motion of a trackball could be a good source of power for a wireless mouse. The ball's movement could also be part of a "wake-up" function to turn on an LED or tracking laser.
Soon the day may come when your wireless 4000 DPI laser mouse has a non-tracking trackball for power. I wonder how many people will misunderstand the purpose of the trackball and try and clean it in order to fix mouse performance.
(I wonder - should I should claim IP rights on this thing?)
Okay - I've seen this comment enough times that I just have to set the record straight. There's nothing in compressed music that makes it inherently inferior to lossless. A CD is usually 720 megabytes. If I want to load it with the highest quality audio possible, I will always choose to compress. A 50 meg MP3 file has vastly superior audio quality to a 50 megabyte PCM file. PCM is usually around 1536 kbps. Can you imagine what an AAC file could do with the same kind of bitrate? I'm guessing at least 192 KHz, 32-bit audio with no perceptual artifacts.
This whole "uncompressed is superior" business is a myth. If we insisted that DVDs have uncompressed video, we'd be stuck with short, pixelated movies because uncompressed DVD-size video takes 40 times as much space.
MP3 has its bitrate capped at 320 kbps. Don't go tarnishing the good name of other audio codecs.
Perhaps I should be clearer. My problem with equating open source with free software is that the words "open source," on their face, do not disclose anything about the underlying intellectual property. When I hear open source, I think of a developer allowing customers and competitors to see what's "under the hood." Customers are able to evaluate the vendor's products at a much more intimate level. Researchers can test and develop the ideas embedded inside the code. I can hardly blame a software company for using a different definition of "open source" than the one proposed at opensource.org; it's not dishonest - just an honest difference in opinion about what the term means.
But it's not just the acadamians who benefit from the open distribution. Developers who want to experiment with the library are free to do so before they decide whether or not to purchase licensing rights. The economy at large benefits from being able to freely experiment with the library, and RapidMind gets wider recognition and the wider range of customers that comes with it.
Note that RapidMind still gets to hold on to its IP in this model.
The words "open source" intuitively mean the open distribution of source code. It's a fully-formed idea that stands on its own merits. The open distribution of intellectual property is a separate idea; it is a different solution to a different problem, and I submit that it needs a separate name.
Open source is about exposing your code to the general public. This enables third-party developers to more easily analyze and make use of your software. It enhances the academic community's ability to experiment with, research, and just generally make "fair use" of software.
Free software is about exposing the intellectual property contained within the code - the copyrights and patents attached to the code. It enhances the public's access to software, and hence their ability to take full advantage of their computers. More importantly, it prevents waste. For example, can you imagine the extra cost to the economy if every developer had to implement public key cryptography from the ground up?
Free software implies open source; open source does not imply free software. Please, let's not confuse the two. It would be wonderful (and arguably sensible) if Microsoft made its code open source. It would be absurd for Microsoft to release its copyright of said code.
Your job depends on using Windows? Quit. It's not that hard. You are not under threat of violence. There are other jobs out there. Start your own business. Mow a lawn, I don't care. You are free people in a free society. Just choose not to participate in what you disagree with. What are you, sheep?
LOTR was not about politics, it was not an allegory. Neither is Bioshock, as I understand it. Politics and political ideology are two different things. Example:
Politics - Democrat vs. Republican
Political ideology - Anarchist vs. Fascist
Slashdot Mirror
"Wait for the store to transfer the case to regular court. Amend your suit to include legal fees and triple damages for being an ass, offering to settle for the original purchase price plus legal fees incurred so far all the while, so the judge knows you aren't being an ass."
I don't know about other jurisdictions, but Ontario requires that claims under $10,000 be resolved in Small Claims Court. Because the courts are for all people, and your government cares.
Suing to return your software is very easy, but almost certainly not worth the effort for each individual consumer.
This is what class actions are for. Of course, if you're going to do a class action, you're far better off suing the software company that drafted the oppressive EULA in the first place. Or filing a complaint for anti-competitive practices.
There are ways to fight abusive big businesses, but personal law suits are rarely the answer.
People expect benchmarks to have "sales puff" in them, so they know to greet the comparisons with a grain of salt.
People expect city streets to have churlish thugs in them, so they know to greet the robbers with a grain of assault. :)
Now that's just silly. If I know that I'm in a spot with inflated death totals, I just need to take some extra lives with me. Death is just another marketing scam from the Wintel conspiracy.
Hmm. This never occurred to me before. Ironically, the motion of a trackball could be a good source of power for a wireless mouse. The ball's movement could also be part of a "wake-up" function to turn on an LED or tracking laser.
Soon the day may come when your wireless 4000 DPI laser mouse has a non-tracking trackball for power. I wonder how many people will misunderstand the purpose of the trackball and try and clean it in order to fix mouse performance.
(I wonder - should I should claim IP rights on this thing?)
Okay - I've seen this comment enough times that I just have to set the record straight. There's nothing in compressed music that makes it inherently inferior to lossless. A CD is usually 720 megabytes. If I want to load it with the highest quality audio possible, I will always choose to compress. A 50 meg MP3 file has vastly superior audio quality to a 50 megabyte PCM file. PCM is usually around 1536 kbps. Can you imagine what an AAC file could do with the same kind of bitrate? I'm guessing at least 192 KHz, 32-bit audio with no perceptual artifacts.
This whole "uncompressed is superior" business is a myth. If we insisted that DVDs have uncompressed video, we'd be stuck with short, pixelated movies because uncompressed DVD-size video takes 40 times as much space.
MP3 has its bitrate capped at 320 kbps. Don't go tarnishing the good name of other audio codecs.
Perhaps I should be clearer. My problem with equating open source with free software is that the words "open source," on their face, do not disclose anything about the underlying intellectual property. When I hear open source, I think of a developer allowing customers and competitors to see what's "under the hood." Customers are able to evaluate the vendor's products at a much more intimate level. Researchers can test and develop the ideas embedded inside the code. I can hardly blame a software company for using a different definition of "open source" than the one proposed at opensource.org; it's not dishonest - just an honest difference in opinion about what the term means.
I also want to emphasize that the need for the "non-free, open source" distinction is meaningful on a practical level. Let me give a concrete example. I once applied (unsuccessfully) to a company called RapidMind that produces middleware for multiprocessing systems. The company came out of the University of Waterloo. In order to attract the best and brightest, the computer science faculty at Waterloo allows its professors to keep intellectual property on their research. RapidMind in turn has an interest in keeping its source code open to the academic community, and its library is freely available online.
But it's not just the acadamians who benefit from the open distribution. Developers who want to experiment with the library are free to do so before they decide whether or not to purchase licensing rights. The economy at large benefits from being able to freely experiment with the library, and RapidMind gets wider recognition and the wider range of customers that comes with it.
Note that RapidMind still gets to hold on to its IP in this model.
The words "open source" intuitively mean the open distribution of source code. It's a fully-formed idea that stands on its own merits. The open distribution of intellectual property is a separate idea; it is a different solution to a different problem, and I submit that it needs a separate name.
Open source is about exposing your code to the general public. This enables third-party developers to more easily analyze and make use of your software. It enhances the academic community's ability to experiment with, research, and just generally make "fair use" of software.
Free software is about exposing the intellectual property contained within the code - the copyrights and patents attached to the code. It enhances the public's access to software, and hence their ability to take full advantage of their computers. More importantly, it prevents waste. For example, can you imagine the extra cost to the economy if every developer had to implement public key cryptography from the ground up?
Free software implies open source; open source does not imply free software. Please, let's not confuse the two. It would be wonderful (and arguably sensible) if Microsoft made its code open source. It would be absurd for Microsoft to release its copyright of said code.
Wrong. Have you never heard of market failure?
I really hope they updated it. Devil May Cry was one of the worst-executed PC ports in recent memory.
Or do you suggest that electricity users should be paying a blanket road tax?