Yeah, it *CAN* be helped. Provide a programmer interface to a DRM interface, but DON'T LOCK THE SYSTEM. I, myself, wouldn't buy such an interface, but I rarely buy games of any sort. (And then I prefer single player games like Civilization.)
I've got nothing against a game requiring that the system be booted into single-application mode, and using DRM. This doesn't bother me at all, and the provision of system capabilities to allow that to be done is fair. To require that the system be operated in such a mode makes it nearly worthless to me, and if I has bought a PS3, I would be furiously angry with Sony, instead of just disgusted.
No, I do not accept that they have *ANY* justice on their side. If they win in court that just means that I'll believe that either they've corrupted the judge, or that the laws are corrupt and don't deserve to be honored. Sony is clearly guilty of defacing their goods AFTER they have sold them. This is, at minimum, vandalism on a grand scale. IANAL, so I won't pretend to tell you just exactly which laws have been broken. To me it looks like grand theft, but I could accept that they laws might say they should be convicted of something else with a similar punishment. There isn't much question as to what they did. They stole property back after they had sold it. (I could understand an argument saying that it wasn't stealing, because they didn't end up with the property, but not one that claimed they didn't unjustly deprive their customers of the capabilities that they had purchased.)
Sony is the villain of the piece. That's the simple end of it. Anyone who trusts them should expect to regret it bitterly.
Sony's reputation went down the toilet nearly a decade ago. (Possibly a bit more.)
They used to make the very best electronics. I still remember a dynamite cassette recorder I once bought. When I tried to replace it (after an unfortunate bath in the ocean) I couldn't. They didn't make them anymore. I bought other things from them, but the quality kept declining. Now.... Well, to be honest I haven't looked at them since the root-kit, but extrapolating, they ought to pay me to take the equipment off their hands.
That's what Sony's reputation is: Maker of shit and retailer of lawsuits and rootkits.
I don't believe you. I can't be certain, because I'm not going to try their product, but I still don't believe you.
If you were to claim that they used to make the best electronics, I'd agree. Then I'd point out that you could say the same thing about HP, and it's not true of them anymore either. Sony lost their "best quality" a very long time ago. Before the rootkit. At that time I was still buying them because they usually weren't much worse, and I kept hoping they'd recover. Now....
If they went bankrupt tomorrow, I wouldn't buy a newspaper to read the details. I consider their desirability to be down near Taco Bell, but their prices are, as you may have noticed, significantly higher. (OTOH, this is just how *I* rate them. As I mentioned, I don't even consider their products anymore.)
The country was already drifting towards a more centralized government. Perhaps without the civil war it wouldn't have drifted quite so fast or so far, but I wouldn't wager heavily on that. The railroads had a *very* large effect on the process. Faster transport and communication make centralized governments more feasible. Just like we wouldn't live in as much of a police state today without computers. Computers drastically reduce the cost of centralization of control, and of tracking people.
So a centralized government was coming anyway. And I expect that over time the EUC will encompass the same trend. (In fact, I think I've seen it happening over the last few decades.)
Yeah, and they don't quote Hamilton much either. Neither would I. Being a "founding father" merely means that you were on the winning side at a particular time in history. Some were wise, some weren't. Jefferson I usually trust and admire. Thomas Paine was a bit too radical for me. And who was the guy who read the first draft of the constitution and said "I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy." He was *really* far-sighted.
But being a found father, on it's own, doesn't buy you much credibility at all at my store.
No, they aren't tried. An emulator isn't a chroot jail. And being able to emit a verifiably safe file isn't something that any common approach has used. (I won't say that no approach has ever used it...email used to be like that before they included html processing...and it *was* safe.)
OTOH, allowing tar files to set executable status of files is a vulnerability, so they can't emit a tar file. Or an html file. Or lisp, python, ruby, etc. Not sure about C, Java, etc. Those need to be compiled before they become dangerous. Maybe require that they start with the chars *3*4*a=*, as that should be illegal in any language.
Actually, autorun probably could be made safe. This would involve insuring that there were no stray pointers, buffer overruns, etc., so the best way to do this is probably a virtual machine that can't write outside of a specified directory. That way the worst that could happen would be that the directory would be corrupt.
To make it even tighter, run it in a copy of a directory, and remove the copy when the process ends.
Mind you, I don't think most current computers are fast enough to make this approach acceptable to users, but I believe that your assertion is incorrect. Autorun *can* be made safe if you do it in a properly limited way.
P.S.: Another way that might be almost as good would be to run the autorun processes as a special user with extremely limited rights. Again, one would want to reinitialize the locations that that user could write to when the process was complete.
And there are probably other approaches that would work. They all severely restrict what the autorun processes can do. I can envision approaches that allow a file to be saved on process termination, but not ones that allow that file to then, itself, be run as a normal process. XPM files that were verifibly safe could, of course, be produced. I'm not as sure about SVG. Basically, the requirement seems to be that the process would need to produce a file of a type that could be verified to be safe.
N.B.: This all requires extra computation. That doesn't mean that it's impossible.
Even the Romans had their Federati, or federated tribes. The US empire, however, is more like that of Egypt, i.e., essentially commercial, with only a minimal military backing.
But it's still an imperial phase. It's just that different empires look different. Alexander's wasn't Rome's wasn't Persia's wasn't Egypt's. They're all different. Most of them don't subsume their member state's identities. (Rome was a bit extreme in that way, though not the most extreme.)
N.B.: I left out the Toltecs, the Aztecs, the Maya, and the Inca. I don't know enough to say more about them than that they had imperial phases.
Loosely speaking a civilization is in an imperial phase when decision making is concentrated in one small group, and it is dominant in the area of the world that is significant to it. A Triumvirate or even a mandarinate isn't enough to keep one out of an imperial phase. (The mandarinate would need to be dominated by a small collection of mandarins [civil servants], but that is the normal way that such groups operate.)
There is an argument that the US isn't really in an imperial phase, because it's leaders are still elected. When, however, I look at the process by which candidates are selected I'm not convinced. Neither is the oligarchy always backing the candidate who eventually succeeds enough to say that it isn't in an imperial phase. (That kind of thing tended to happen in Rome, too, until the Praetorian Guard started selecting emperors. I'm not sure about after they were removed [the Guard, I mean].)
OTOH, I think that the US empire is more similar to Egypt's empire...basically commercial. This may mean that it's fall will be basically commercial, and the military force involved will be minor. It is certainly to be hoped that this is the case. (I wish I knew more about the Egyptian empire, so I could make better arguments, but I'm a bit weak on it. I am, however, [I think!!] talking about post Alexander. However their earlier empire was also basically commercial. Militarily it was so weak that it was unable to defend Israel from an invasion by either the Philistines or the Hebrews. Commercially it was so strong that it effectively reconquered the province within a few decades. [OTOH, Egypt was quite happy to not be obligated to defend against the Assyrians, so they might have even *wanted* a buffer state. But I may be conflating periods of time.])
I think he's suggesting that insider trading is running unchecked. Not an unreasonable stance. The noise they made about Martha Stewart suggests to me that they wanted a smoke screen.
I don't doubt that she was guilty, but the amount that she was guilty of was truly trivial. I'm not sure it was out of the petty theft level. (Well, it's an old memory, and not that precise.)
24 hours isn't long enough. It should be at least a week, with preprogrammed buy and sell orders within that week allowed.
Alternatively, have there be a tax on stock transactions that decreases if you hold the stock for a long period of time. Say 100% if you hold it for 1 minute and 0% if you hold it for 5 years. Other values determined by linear interpolation. (Yes, you pay more than 100% of the stock value if you hold it for less than a minute, and you are paid if you hold it for more than 5 years. But you don't get the benefit of this until you *do* sell the stock. And if the company goes bankrupt you forfeit.)
The US is still a superpower, just in the declining imperial phase. (This is not a good place to be.)
I hope we can manage the transition to whoever follow us without a war. This, however, isn't usual. Usually the declining superpower refused to acknowledge the fact until it's brutally pushed home. Rome died this way, even splitting into halves didn't solve the problem. Britain navigated it more gracefully, but there was still a major war involved. And I haven't even identified who the rising superpower is going to be. There are three major contenders, but it usually turns out to be someone unexpected. (The US is an exception here. They became a clear contender by 1870.)
The three contenders seem, to me, to be the EUC, China, and India. Japan doesn't seem interested. But the dark horse could come from nearly anywhere, and would depend on a chance of history. Perhaps Brazil, or South Africa, Or somebody might reunite the USSR countries. Or too many others to seriously contemplate.
One possibility that might happen is that the UN could become stronger. I really doubt this, but they could move into the superpower role. This would require them acquiring the ability to enforce the collection of taxes.
One thing that probably *isn't* possible is that there could be *NO* superpower. It might be a coalition, but even if it were a coalition, there would be some leading power. (This, by the way, is, historically, less stable than having a country be the superpower. It is, however, analogous to the way Russia dominated the USSR. Which, please notice, didn't endure even a century.)
Well, that's a bit over the top, though the general idea seems correct.
OTOH, I have trouble naming a president since Eisenhower of which this wasn't true. And I'm not sure about Eisenhower. He may have been "a lovable old duffer with a cabinet full of snakes", or he may have chosen them and guided them. I was too young to tell.
You are being silly. The grandparent's point was quite valid.
If you wish to communicate an important message with maximal effect, it's best to not use language that will cause a part of your audience to reject it without thought.
In this case the idea of "whoring" or "prostitute" is such a term. Perhaps you could compare them to someone less respectable, like a telephone solicitor or spammer. (Yeah, it doesn't seem to work as well.)
In this culture the idea that you are referring to seems to be inherently sex-linked, even though there's no obvious reason that it should be so. Even just saying that "Napolitano has sold herself body and soul to the RIAA and MPAA" sounds inextricably sexist, even though there's no logical reason that it should do so. And if you just said "Napolitano has sold her soul to the RIAA and MPAA" it would sound pathetically fundamentalist christian. Or, if it didn't strike you that way, it wouldn't sound as intense as you appear to mean it to sound.
So saying "Napolitano is a whore for the RIAA and MPAA" may be the best that can be done to communicate your feeling, even though it alienates a part of your audience.
Can you opt out after you've installed the Bing Bar? What proportion of the users understand that their web browsing is being tracked?
Without answers to those questions, I can't accept your opinion. And as I'm not about to install that thing, I can't determine the answers myself.
(OTOH, I do have a default belief that you won't be able to reverse the option of being tracked. And that even if you appear to have uninstalled the Bing Bar a fragment will be left behind that will continue to track you and forward the results. As it's a default, there isn't much certainty behind it, but without further information, that's what I'll presume.)
From what people have been saying, MS didn't inform you either, in any meaningful sense of the term. Given their history, I tend to believe that. It's true that I quit using them because of what I believed the EULA meant, but I wasn't certain at all. It was written by lawyers for lawyers, and anyone else who tried to understand it would be guessing blindly. So anything I say about one of their current licenses is based on quite awhile ago.
And I have no experience with Bing. I'm operating based on what others have said. I switched to OSI approved licenses for a few years around a decade ago. Then they started approving some licenses that I considered extremely dubious, and now I generally only accept GPL, CC, or BSD licenses. There are a couple of other licenses that I'll accept, that were approved by OSI a long time ago. (I'm including the AGPL as a GPL license.)
This is because I *do* read the EULAs. And also I've seen how lawyers can twist words until grey means either black or white, depending on what they want to prove.
It's probably not illegal where I live, but it certainly is a underhanded practice. Customers *MAY* benefit, but it is directly intended to damage Sam's club's business. (And it's not at all clear that customers will benefit.)
That would just make Google a single point of failure. And you may trust them now, but they're already no longer the good guy they were 5 years ago. What will they be in another 5 years.
ANY single point of failure is a bad decision. ANY. I don't care how much you trust them today, tomorrow they could be taken over by the military or hit by a warrant. One requiring that they not admit that they were subject to oversight control.
Monopolies are inherently evil. All monopolies. Some we haven't yet figured out how to do without, but that just makes them necessary, that doesn't mean that they aren't evil. Some are active evils, and are easy to recognize. Others are passive evils, and their evil lies mainly in accustoming those dependent on them to their control. But passive evils can switch to active evils quite rapidly. All it takes is a change in the board of directors.
A true solution won't create a new choke-point. I've heard a couple of proposals, but I can't judge whether they'd accomplish what they claim. But the idea that it should be impossible to revoke a domain name has a degree of plausibility. Think of it as being for the same reason that resources shared by parallel processes should be read-only whenever possible.
1) You didn't say anything about how muich this is likely to cost. Or what happens if you don't have that kind of money. 2) You didn't say anything about how long this is likely to take. 3) You didn't specify how one goes about appealing this, and demonstrating that one has standing.
FWIW, victims of this approach usually look at the costs of attempting to recover their property, and how long it's likely to take, and just write it off. Guilt or innocence are irrelevant, when the costs of defending yourself are more than you can afford.
P.S.: It's quite frequent for the impounded items to disappear with no official trace from the police evidence "locker". (Naturally cars aren't kept in a literal locker.) And in at least one state they are officially sold to finance more "police" activities. (Sorry, I'm not certain that it's a state, it could be a county or a city. I want to flag this Illinois, but I can't remember the original source, so I'm not sure.) But criminal charges aren't even necessarily ever filed. Or they may be filed and dropped, but the property continue to be held.
The details of this kind of thing tend to only come out when someone fights through the courts successfully to reclaim seized property, only to find that it's no longer available. Naturally this is a news story....but usually on page 5, so few people notice it.
I don't follow your logic. I tend to consider them both wrong, but for quite different reasons. (And it's different yet again for different meanings of the term "piracy".)
You also seem to be assuming that all wrongs are of the same size. I'd say that when a powerful entity subjugates a less powerful entity, and force is the only argument, then a large wrong is done, though the precise degree of harm is only determinable by considering how much damage is inflicted, there is also the question of "Was it in self defense, or proper defense of another?", which is generally considered to even justify homicide (though some jurisdictions disagree).
Piracy in the sense of copying something that someone else has created, without the use of force, is a minor to trivial wrong, but it can be magnified if it does great harm. It's hard to see how it could be "self defense, or proper defense of another". But it's also very rarely done with the intent to harm.
The two cases don't seem very similar at all to me.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this programming language "D4"? I've heard of "The D Programming Language", but not of "D4".
I blame them. They had no right to make that choice. It was blatantly unjust to those who had purchased the system for the otherOS option.
Yeah, it *CAN* be helped. Provide a programmer interface to a DRM interface, but DON'T LOCK THE SYSTEM. I, myself, wouldn't buy such an interface, but I rarely buy games of any sort. (And then I prefer single player games like Civilization.)
I've got nothing against a game requiring that the system be booted into single-application mode, and using DRM. This doesn't bother me at all, and the provision of system capabilities to allow that to be done is fair. To require that the system be operated in such a mode makes it nearly worthless to me, and if I has bought a PS3, I would be furiously angry with Sony, instead of just disgusted.
No, I do not accept that they have *ANY* justice on their side. If they win in court that just means that I'll believe that either they've corrupted the judge, or that the laws are corrupt and don't deserve to be honored. Sony is clearly guilty of defacing their goods AFTER they have sold them. This is, at minimum, vandalism on a grand scale. IANAL, so I won't pretend to tell you just exactly which laws have been broken. To me it looks like grand theft, but I could accept that they laws might say they should be convicted of something else with a similar punishment. There isn't much question as to what they did. They stole property back after they had sold it. (I could understand an argument saying that it wasn't stealing, because they didn't end up with the property, but not one that claimed they didn't unjustly deprive their customers of the capabilities that they had purchased.)
Sony is the villain of the piece. That's the simple end of it. Anyone who trusts them should expect to regret it bitterly.
Sony's reputation went down the toilet nearly a decade ago. (Possibly a bit more.)
They used to make the very best electronics. I still remember a dynamite cassette recorder I once bought. When I tried to replace it (after an unfortunate bath in the ocean) I couldn't. They didn't make them anymore. I bought other things from them, but the quality kept declining. Now.... Well, to be honest I haven't looked at them since the root-kit, but extrapolating, they ought to pay me to take the equipment off their hands.
That's what Sony's reputation is: Maker of shit and retailer of lawsuits and rootkits.
I don't believe you. I can't be certain, because I'm not going to try their product, but I still don't believe you.
If you were to claim that they used to make the best electronics, I'd agree. Then I'd point out that you could say the same thing about HP, and it's not true of them anymore either. Sony lost their "best quality" a very long time ago. Before the rootkit. At that time I was still buying them because they usually weren't much worse, and I kept hoping they'd recover. Now....
If they went bankrupt tomorrow, I wouldn't buy a newspaper to read the details. I consider their desirability to be down near Taco Bell, but their prices are, as you may have noticed, significantly higher. (OTOH, this is just how *I* rate them. As I mentioned, I don't even consider their products anymore.)
The country was already drifting towards a more centralized government. Perhaps without the civil war it wouldn't have drifted quite so fast or so far, but I wouldn't wager heavily on that. The railroads had a *very* large effect on the process. Faster transport and communication make centralized governments more feasible. Just like we wouldn't live in as much of a police state today without computers. Computers drastically reduce the cost of centralization of control, and of tracking people.
So a centralized government was coming anyway. And I expect that over time the EUC will encompass the same trend. (In fact, I think I've seen it happening over the last few decades.)
Yeah, and they don't quote Hamilton much either. Neither would I. Being a "founding father" merely means that you were on the winning side at a particular time in history. Some were wise, some weren't. Jefferson I usually trust and admire. Thomas Paine was a bit too radical for me. And who was the guy who read the first draft of the constitution and said "I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy." He was *really* far-sighted.
But being a found father, on it's own, doesn't buy you much credibility at all at my store.
No, they aren't tried. An emulator isn't a chroot jail. And being able to emit a verifiably safe file isn't something that any common approach has used. (I won't say that no approach has ever used it...email used to be like that before they included html processing...and it *was* safe.)
OTOH, allowing tar files to set executable status of files is a vulnerability, so they can't emit a tar file. Or an html file. Or lisp, python, ruby, etc. Not sure about C, Java, etc. Those need to be compiled before they become dangerous. Maybe require that they start with the chars *3*4*a=*, as that should be illegal in any language.
Actually, autorun probably could be made safe. This would involve insuring that there were no stray pointers, buffer overruns, etc., so the best way to do this is probably a virtual machine that can't write outside of a specified directory. That way the worst that could happen would be that the directory would be corrupt.
To make it even tighter, run it in a copy of a directory, and remove the copy when the process ends.
Mind you, I don't think most current computers are fast enough to make this approach acceptable to users, but I believe that your assertion is incorrect. Autorun *can* be made safe if you do it in a properly limited way.
P.S.: Another way that might be almost as good would be to run the autorun processes as a special user with extremely limited rights. Again, one would want to reinitialize the locations that that user could write to when the process was complete.
And there are probably other approaches that would work. They all severely restrict what the autorun processes can do. I can envision approaches that allow a file to be saved on process termination, but not ones that allow that file to then, itself, be run as a normal process. XPM files that were verifibly safe could, of course, be produced. I'm not as sure about SVG. Basically, the requirement seems to be that the process would need to produce a file of a type that could be verified to be safe.
N.B.: This all requires extra computation. That doesn't mean that it's impossible.
Even the Romans had their Federati, or federated tribes. The US empire, however, is more like that of Egypt, i.e., essentially commercial, with only a minimal military backing.
But it's still an imperial phase. It's just that different empires look different. Alexander's wasn't Rome's wasn't Persia's wasn't Egypt's. They're all different. Most of them don't subsume their member state's identities. (Rome was a bit extreme in that way, though not the most extreme.)
N.B.: I left out the Toltecs, the Aztecs, the Maya, and the Inca. I don't know enough to say more about them than that they had imperial phases.
Loosely speaking a civilization is in an imperial phase when decision making is concentrated in one small group, and it is dominant in the area of the world that is significant to it. A Triumvirate or even a mandarinate isn't enough to keep one out of an imperial phase. (The mandarinate would need to be dominated by a small collection of mandarins [civil servants], but that is the normal way that such groups operate.)
There is an argument that the US isn't really in an imperial phase, because it's leaders are still elected. When, however, I look at the process by which candidates are selected I'm not convinced. Neither is the oligarchy always backing the candidate who eventually succeeds enough to say that it isn't in an imperial phase. (That kind of thing tended to happen in Rome, too, until the Praetorian Guard started selecting emperors. I'm not sure about after they were removed [the Guard, I mean].)
OTOH, I think that the US empire is more similar to Egypt's empire...basically commercial. This may mean that it's fall will be basically commercial, and the military force involved will be minor. It is certainly to be hoped that this is the case. (I wish I knew more about the Egyptian empire, so I could make better arguments, but I'm a bit weak on it. I am, however, [I think!!] talking about post Alexander. However their earlier empire was also basically commercial. Militarily it was so weak that it was unable to defend Israel from an invasion by either the Philistines or the Hebrews. Commercially it was so strong that it effectively reconquered the province within a few decades. [OTOH, Egypt was quite happy to not be obligated to defend against the Assyrians, so they might have even *wanted* a buffer state. But I may be conflating periods of time.])
I think he's suggesting that insider trading is running unchecked. Not an unreasonable stance. The noise they made about Martha Stewart suggests to me that they wanted a smoke screen.
I don't doubt that she was guilty, but the amount that she was guilty of was truly trivial. I'm not sure it was out of the petty theft level. (Well, it's an old memory, and not that precise.)
24 hours isn't long enough. It should be at least a week, with preprogrammed buy and sell orders within that week allowed.
Alternatively, have there be a tax on stock transactions that decreases if you hold the stock for a long period of time. Say 100% if you hold it for 1 minute and 0% if you hold it for 5 years. Other values determined by linear interpolation. (Yes, you pay more than 100% of the stock value if you hold it for less than a minute, and you are paid if you hold it for more than 5 years. But you don't get the benefit of this until you *do* sell the stock. And if the company goes bankrupt you forfeit.)
The US is still a superpower, just in the declining imperial phase. (This is not a good place to be.)
I hope we can manage the transition to whoever follow us without a war. This, however, isn't usual. Usually the declining superpower refused to acknowledge the fact until it's brutally pushed home. Rome died this way, even splitting into halves didn't solve the problem. Britain navigated it more gracefully, but there was still a major war involved. And I haven't even identified who the rising superpower is going to be. There are three major contenders, but it usually turns out to be someone unexpected. (The US is an exception here. They became a clear contender by 1870.)
The three contenders seem, to me, to be the EUC, China, and India. Japan doesn't seem interested. But the dark horse could come from nearly anywhere, and would depend on a chance of history. Perhaps Brazil, or South Africa, Or somebody might reunite the USSR countries. Or too many others to seriously contemplate.
One possibility that might happen is that the UN could become stronger. I really doubt this, but they could move into the superpower role. This would require them acquiring the ability to enforce the collection of taxes.
One thing that probably *isn't* possible is that there could be *NO* superpower. It might be a coalition, but even if it were a coalition, there would be some leading power. (This, by the way, is, historically, less stable than having a country be the superpower. It is, however, analogous to the way Russia dominated the USSR. Which, please notice, didn't endure even a century.)
How about "He's ineffectual when it comes to doing anything to help the citizenry, but hell on wheels at helping the corporations."?
Anyone who thinks he's out to defend the rights of the citizenry should remember that he voted for FISA *WHILE* running for the presidency.
OTOH, McCain/Palin would probably have been worse, and possibly much worse.
Well, that's a bit over the top, though the general idea seems correct.
OTOH, I have trouble naming a president since Eisenhower of which this wasn't true. And I'm not sure about Eisenhower. He may have been "a lovable old duffer with a cabinet full of snakes", or he may have chosen them and guided them. I was too young to tell.
You are being silly. The grandparent's point was quite valid.
If you wish to communicate an important message with maximal effect, it's best to not use language that will cause a part of your audience to reject it without thought.
In this case the idea of "whoring" or "prostitute" is such a term. Perhaps you could compare them to someone less respectable, like a telephone solicitor or spammer. (Yeah, it doesn't seem to work as well.)
In this culture the idea that you are referring to seems to be inherently sex-linked, even though there's no obvious reason that it should be so. Even just saying that "Napolitano has sold herself body and soul to the RIAA and MPAA" sounds inextricably sexist, even though there's no logical reason that it should do so. And if you just said "Napolitano has sold her soul to the RIAA and MPAA" it would sound pathetically fundamentalist christian. Or, if it didn't strike you that way, it wouldn't sound as intense as you appear to mean it to sound.
So saying "Napolitano is a whore for the RIAA and MPAA" may be the best that can be done to communicate your feeling, even though it alienates a part of your audience.
Can you opt out after you've installed the Bing Bar?
What proportion of the users understand that their web browsing is being tracked?
Without answers to those questions, I can't accept your opinion. And as I'm not about to install that thing, I can't determine the answers myself.
(OTOH, I do have a default belief that you won't be able to reverse the option of being tracked. And that even if you appear to have uninstalled the Bing Bar a fragment will be left behind that will continue to track you and forward the results. As it's a default, there isn't much certainty behind it, but without further information, that's what I'll presume.)
From what people have been saying, MS didn't inform you either, in any meaningful sense of the term. Given their history, I tend to believe that. It's true that I quit using them because of what I believed the EULA meant, but I wasn't certain at all. It was written by lawyers for lawyers, and anyone else who tried to understand it would be guessing blindly. So anything I say about one of their current licenses is based on quite awhile ago.
And I have no experience with Bing. I'm operating based on what others have said. I switched to OSI approved licenses for a few years around a decade ago. Then they started approving some licenses that I considered extremely dubious, and now I generally only accept GPL, CC, or BSD licenses. There are a couple of other licenses that I'll accept, that were approved by OSI a long time ago. (I'm including the AGPL as a GPL license.)
This is because I *do* read the EULAs. And also I've seen how lawyers can twist words until grey means either black or white, depending on what they want to prove.
Yeah, that seems a pretty close analogy.
It's probably not illegal where I live, but it certainly is a underhanded practice. Customers *MAY* benefit, but it is directly intended to damage Sam's club's business. (And it's not at all clear that customers will benefit.)
You're talking about the man who voted for FISA while he was running for president. For him to veto such a bill would strain my credulity.
Probably not, but what repercussions will happen to the ones who violated the law?
Since there aren't any, it's being illegal is of no import.
P.S.: Is there even any effective way to challenge it? If so, I haven't heard of it. (And notice that I didn't say successfully challenge.)
That would just make Google a single point of failure. And you may trust them now, but they're already no longer the good guy they were 5 years ago. What will they be in another 5 years.
ANY single point of failure is a bad decision. ANY. I don't care how much you trust them today, tomorrow they could be taken over by the military or hit by a warrant. One requiring that they not admit that they were subject to oversight control.
Monopolies are inherently evil. All monopolies. Some we haven't yet figured out how to do without, but that just makes them necessary, that doesn't mean that they aren't evil. Some are active evils, and are easy to recognize. Others are passive evils, and their evil lies mainly in accustoming those dependent on them to their control. But passive evils can switch to active evils quite rapidly. All it takes is a change in the board of directors.
A true solution won't create a new choke-point. I've heard a couple of proposals, but I can't judge whether they'd accomplish what they claim. But the idea that it should be impossible to revoke a domain name has a degree of plausibility. Think of it as being for the same reason that resources shared by parallel processes should be read-only whenever possible.
1) You didn't say anything about how muich this is likely to cost. Or what happens if you don't have that kind of money.
2) You didn't say anything about how long this is likely to take.
3) You didn't specify how one goes about appealing this, and demonstrating that one has standing.
FWIW, victims of this approach usually look at the costs of attempting to recover their property, and how long it's likely to take, and just write it off. Guilt or innocence are irrelevant, when the costs of defending yourself are more than you can afford.
P.S.: It's quite frequent for the impounded items to disappear with no official trace from the police evidence "locker". (Naturally cars aren't kept in a literal locker.) And in at least one state they are officially sold to finance more "police" activities. (Sorry, I'm not certain that it's a state, it could be a county or a city. I want to flag this Illinois, but I can't remember the original source, so I'm not sure.) But criminal charges aren't even necessarily ever filed. Or they may be filed and dropped, but the property continue to be held.
The details of this kind of thing tend to only come out when someone fights through the courts successfully to reclaim seized property, only to find that it's no longer available. Naturally this is a news story....but usually on page 5, so few people notice it.
I don't follow your logic. I tend to consider them both wrong, but for quite different reasons. (And it's different yet again for different meanings of the term "piracy".)
You also seem to be assuming that all wrongs are of the same size. I'd say that when a powerful entity subjugates a less powerful entity, and force is the only argument, then a large wrong is done, though the precise degree of harm is only determinable by considering how much damage is inflicted, there is also the question of "Was it in self defense, or proper defense of another?", which is generally considered to even justify homicide (though some jurisdictions disagree).
Piracy in the sense of copying something that someone else has created, without the use of force, is a minor to trivial wrong, but it can be magnified if it does great harm. It's hard to see how it could be "self defense, or proper defense of another". But it's also very rarely done with the intent to harm.
The two cases don't seem very similar at all to me.
Isn't that what 611 [is | used to be] for?
(It's been quite awhile since I looked in that section of the phone book. A decade or so.)