As much as I like to side with the little guy, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the courts to recognize the impracticality of requiring that EULAs be read or signed before every sale, instead giving the customer full legal rights to reject the product after it has arrived and they've had the opportunity to read the EULA. Obviously the EULA has to be reasonable, and your candy example just demonstrates how obvious unreasonable terms can be.
The problem here is that the most that will be refunded is the purchase price, when the actual cost to the purchaser - in lost time, gas, opportunity costs, etc - is usually significantly greater. If the refund was for the whole cost, I'd agree that it was reasonable. Given that even if the purchaser rejects the offer they will end up losing out, I assert that modifying contracts after the fact is totally unreasonable. What's wrong with printing it on the outside of the box?
And isn't North Korea a sovereign nation as well (in spite of being governed by a maniac)? Why bother with the weapons they possess? Isn't Iran a sovereign nation? It's up to them where they place their missiles... why bother with it? And why such a complication around their nuclear program? Isn't it up to them the weapons they have and where they aim them to?
NPT violation. They made a promise and went back on it, or look very close to doing so. (Yes, the US also are violating the NPT as well, but that's a separate conversation).
I am not willing because it can infect software that I do not have the rights to.
GPL code doesn't "infect" anything. It's an invitation to enter into a contract, which you are free to accept or refuse. If you don't have the rights necessary to enter into said contract, that's not the licensor's problem. Like everyone says: "don't like the GPL? write your own goddam code and stop whining".
If a company is considering using open source and then realize that at some time in the future a revision to the license, let's call it GPL4, might come out and completely kill their business model, some will not want to take that risk.
Nope, license revisions are not retroactive. The code that they're already using is still licensed under the original license. If their business model relies on "we assume that we will continue to receive valuable code for free in the future for ever and ever, amen, without doing anything in return" then, yes, they're fucked. But people that dumb deserve to be.
We in England have never had the right to bear arms,
Not true, in fact archery practice was mandatory for quite some time, and in some border towns killing Welsh people was regarded as a public service. If by "never" you mean "in the last 100 years" and by "arms" you mean "guns", I think you'll find that the restrictions were very different pre-WW2, definitely pre-WW1.
How about a right to bare breasts? Now that really would be popular!
Make it simple. Everyone...reduce your individual countries emissions by x% in y years. No breaks, no 'trading', no excuses. X%.
Here's an even simpler one. 96% of the population of the planet guarantee that they will keep their average emissions at 80% of those of the other 4% until we reach a stable level.
You seem to have a negative attitude towards C++ - how come? It is a superset of C, meaning it is capable of everything C is. It was designed (IMO quite well) from the beginning to be comparable to C in speed if used properly. On top of this, it was also designed to be more readable, maintainable, and safe.
My problem with C++ is that it's unmaintainable, for two reasons: first, it supports (usually in a very ugly manner) a whole host of different programming paradigms that often get mixed inside one project, and second, it allows redefinition of the language to the extent that you cannot make any statements at all about the behaviour of a program unless you've read through every single header file that it references, and the ones that they reference, and so on. (I'm thinking particularly of pass-by-reference and operator overloading, but there are others). In short, it was a nice idea, but they've tried to make it a "do everything you want any way you want" language and that's resulted in bloat, usability issues, and, well, it's just plain ugly. I can write it, and sometimes do, but more often use it as a compilation target.
Even in the hands of a novice, C++ is mostly harmless (ignoring memory issues) due to smarter compilers and cheap clock cycles.
Most languuages are if programs written in them don't touch memory that they don't own:)
As far as ASM - I have studied my share of it in my EE undergrad, and I found it to be close to useless except in the simplest of embedded devices or to replace 10 lines of code in a loop
It depends on the application area, though I would say that the ability to read ASM (so that you can tune the compiler output) is far more important than the ability to write it.
What kinds of programming do you do?
I tend to work close to the hardware/software boundary. In terms of programming tasks, that means I use C/ASM for driver and firmware coding, Haskell for toolchain development (compilers, etc) and algorithm research, Verilog for sizing small hardware fragments, and automatically generated C++ template stacks for architectural modelling (half a million lines of template code that collapses down to a single object instance).
the number of C/C++ programmers dwarfs the number of pure C programmers.
It's probably accurate to say that the number of people writing C/C++ code dwarfs the number of people writing pure C code. Whether the majority of the former group can be counted as programmers is another issue entirely;-)
Disclaimer: I write in asm, C, or Haskell, or the code I write does. Low-level for performance, high-level for abstraction. The stuff in the middle is the worse of both worlds. And I still can't decide whether Java is obscene or just amusing.
You're missing the entire point. An opaque piece of cloth has many uses. What would you use the drugs for it not to intoxicate yourself, thereby endangering both yourself and others?
And you're taking something used as a simple illustration of an argument and mistaking it for the whole argument. If you want a better but messier, try this: if I drive down the street to pick up a DVD rental, I am running a (very slight) risk of injuring another human being for no more reason than my own pleasure. My pleasure has no "use" to anyone else, so why should I be allowed to drive a motor vehicle for anything other than essential purposes?
Furthermore, the psychological ramifications of using an artificial substance to stimulate/depress your brain in order to create/depress emotions are all absolutely detrimental to your health.
Agreed, and I've seen it first-hand as well. But banning a substance because of its effects on non-users is a very different kettle of fish to banning it because of its effects on people who knowingly consume it. I don't believe I own anyone else's body, and I don't believe that anyone else owns mine.
You're arguing the freedom to use substances which take away your freedom.
Yes, you could put it that way. But I also claim that using such substances does not take away your responsibility for your actions. Saying that "the drugs made me do it" is as much nonsense as "God made me do it".
Perhaps you should get off the drugs long enough for your frontal lobe to develop - you know, the part of your head which deals in high-level cognitive areas like foresight and long-range planning.
I quit cigarettes 4 months ago, if that's what you mean. The only other mind-altering substances I use are beer once in a while and a small quantity of high fructose corn syrup when working late.
Well, let's see. For Marijuana alone, 57% of adults aged 19-28 admit to having used it at some point in their lives . I think that it's safe to say that the vast majority of those people have not harmed another human being due to their drug use - if it were otherwise society would have completely collapsed by now.
but we both know when arguing pro-drugs you have to use the words "vast" and "majority" to sound persuasive, like the "vast majority" who are pro-drugs really need an argument anyway. Maybe the "itty-bitty minority" might need the argument though so we'll be that much closer to a drug utopia. Although why you all feel drugs are so needed that evolution forgot to include them in your design is a complete mystery.
You should slow down and read what people have written before responding. I never claimed that the "vast majority" of people were pro-drugs and I didn't even claim that drugs were needed.
Yes, when parents don't feed their children because they need drug money, its a victimless crime, no one other than the parent is hurt!
No, it's child abuse, just the same as if they spent the children's money on a trip to Vegas. That doesn't mean that staying in a luxury hotel or selling someone an airline ticket is or should be a crime.
When people cant think properly because they've taken too many drugs
No, it's criminal negligence, just the same as if they put on a blindfold and got into their car. That doesn't mean that owning opaque pieces of cloth should be a crime.
People dealing drugs to others, even when the others haven't been shown how dangerous the drugs are, is a victimless crime. The people who recieved the drugs certainly weren't hurt!
If you choose to consent to something, you aren't a victim of it. Now, there might be a small minority that were addicted by someone else, in which case they are victims, but most people who use drugs choose to do so.
(And so on for the other examples)
Honestly, I could care less about the people who know the risks, and still use the drugs to the point of harming themselves. It's those that use them and harm others in the process, that bother me.
The vast majority of drug users don't harm others. For the minority that do, harming others is already a crime, so punish them for that.
What's happening to the tax money we're already paying?
From memory - I'd have to go hunting to find the actual papers and I can't be bothered at this time on a Saturday night - gasoline in the US retails for about 17% below its actual cost, where actual cost includes road maintenance, increased healthcare costs, pollution cleanup, oil company subsidies, etc. The tax money we're already paying to drive is less than the externalized cost of driving.
In Europe, it's about 40% above actual cost. The other thing that folks in the US forget is that due to the massive increase in national debt, the dollar has dropped in value. In other words gas hasn't got that much more expensive in "absolute" terms - dollars have become worth less due to US govt policies.
Physical units? Really? How fast is your 4Mbps internet connection?
A second is a physical unit. If it weren't, the meaning of "4Mbps" would be defined by convention, not diktat.
Oh, that's right, you are just full of it with that "physical unit" garbage.
No, I'm pointing out the limited scope of SI. Assuming that its scope extends beyond that defined for it is ignorant. Having information allows people to make informed decisions and judge an argument accurately.
Saying that M is defined to be 10^6 only for physical units is not saying that M is 10^6 only for physical units. What it is saying is that we are free to define it to optimise for global consistency or for local utility.
I'm on the side of local utility, you are on the side of global consistency. That's fine. All I am saying is that bringing SI definitions into the argument as the voice of authority is intellectually dishonest as the scope of SI does not extend to bytes.
Firstly, the 'mega' prefix (for example) was defined to mean 10^6
Well, it was defined as such only in the context of SI physical units, which do not include bytes.
Although people have much later tried to define it with respect to bytes as well, there are a large number of people (including myself) who regard this as unwanted interference with something that has worked very well for the majority of the lifetime of the computing field. It has increased confusion, not reduced it, because prior to this mebi-rubbish, usage was unequivocally determined by context.
I decided to quit smoking a couple of days ago, and coffee is a "trigger".
Just cleared four months smoke-free today. Stayed away from bars for the first couple of months, still don't dare get screamingly drunk yet. It's worth it though - I just got myself a Roomba and a $400 bottle of whisky out of the cash I've saved, let alone all the health stuff. Stick it out, it stops getting worse after the first week.
Ford doesn't sue the soccer mom that drives a Chevy Suburban if the Suburban violates patents Ford owns - Ford sues Chevy.
Ah, but what would be a far more interesting variation would be IBM or Sun or some other large hardware company with an extensive patent portfolio suing Microsoft for using patent infringing chips in the computers it uses to carry out its day-to-day business and getting an injunction stopping Microsoft from powering on even a single computer for several weeks. Wouldn't that be a delight to see...
Maybe they're so secretive because looking at a full spec or at the code to the driver would show clearly that they are infringing on each other's patents.
All the GPU manufacturers have cross-license deals with each other. You can't make a GPU without permission from all of the incumbents.
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As much as I like to side with the little guy, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the courts to recognize the impracticality of requiring that EULAs be read or signed before every sale, instead giving the customer full legal rights to reject the product after it has arrived and they've had the opportunity to read the EULA. Obviously the EULA has to be reasonable, and your candy example just demonstrates how obvious unreasonable terms can be.
The problem here is that the most that will be refunded is the purchase price, when the actual cost to the purchaser - in lost time, gas, opportunity costs, etc - is usually significantly greater. If the refund was for the whole cost, I'd agree that it was reasonable. Given that even if the purchaser rejects the offer they will end up losing out, I assert that modifying contracts after the fact is totally unreasonable. What's wrong with printing it on the outside of the box?
Hrm. Louisiana purchase for one?
If people willingly sell you their land, there's nothing wrong with buying it.
True, if they have legitimate title to said land. If they don't, and you know it, then there is something wrong with buying it.
None at all. Is that a problem?
And isn't North Korea a sovereign nation as well (in spite of being governed by a maniac)? Why bother with the weapons they possess? Isn't Iran a sovereign nation? It's up to them where they place their missiles... why bother with it? And why such a complication around their nuclear program? Isn't it up to them the weapons they have and where they aim them to?
NPT violation. They made a promise and went back on it, or look very close to doing so. (Yes, the US also are violating the NPT as well, but that's a separate conversation).
I think that the US should be placing missiles in their territory, not in... for god sake... Poland?
Poland is a sovereign nation, so it's up to them what missiles they permit on their territory, not the US and not Russia. Why is this so complicated?
I am not willing because it can infect software that I do not have the rights to.
GPL code doesn't "infect" anything. It's an invitation to enter into a contract, which you are free to accept or refuse. If you don't have the rights necessary to enter into said contract, that's not the licensor's problem. Like everyone says: "don't like the GPL? write your own goddam code and stop whining".
If a company is considering using open source and then realize that at some time in the future a revision to the license, let's call it GPL4, might come out and completely kill their business model, some will not want to take that risk.
Nope, license revisions are not retroactive. The code that they're already using is still licensed under the original license. If their business model relies on "we assume that we will continue to receive valuable code for free in the future for ever and ever, amen, without doing anything in return" then, yes, they're fucked. But people that dumb deserve to be.
We in England have never had the right to bear arms,
Not true, in fact archery practice was mandatory for quite some time, and in some border towns killing Welsh people was regarded as a public service. If by "never" you mean "in the last 100 years" and by "arms" you mean "guns", I think you'll find that the restrictions were very different pre-WW2, definitely pre-WW1.
How about a right to bare breasts? Now that really would be popular!
Hrm. Maybe. Depends on the breasts.
Make it simple. Everyone...reduce your individual countries emissions by x% in y years. No breaks, no 'trading', no excuses. X%.
Here's an even simpler one. 96% of the population of the planet guarantee that they will keep their average emissions at 80% of those of the other 4% until we reach a stable level.
The State of New Jersey.
To which, as you'd expect, my reply is: "and who is the State of New Jersey the property of?" :)
But what about the camera? It's still property of the NJTA.
... and who is the NJTA the property of?
You seem to have a negative attitude towards C++ - how come? It is a superset of C, meaning it is capable of everything C is. It was designed (IMO quite well) from the beginning to be comparable to C in speed if used properly. On top of this, it was also designed to be more readable, maintainable, and safe.
My problem with C++ is that it's unmaintainable, for two reasons: first, it supports (usually in a very ugly manner) a whole host of different programming paradigms that often get mixed inside one project, and second, it allows redefinition of the language to the extent that you cannot make any statements at all about the behaviour of a program unless you've read through every single header file that it references, and the ones that they reference, and so on. (I'm thinking particularly of pass-by-reference and operator overloading, but there are others). In short, it was a nice idea, but they've tried to make it a "do everything you want any way you want" language and that's resulted in bloat, usability issues, and, well, it's just plain ugly. I can write it, and sometimes do, but more often use it as a compilation target.
Even in the hands of a novice, C++ is mostly harmless (ignoring memory issues) due to smarter compilers and cheap clock cycles.
Most languuages are if programs written in them don't touch memory that they don't own :)
As far as ASM - I have studied my share of it in my EE undergrad, and I found it to be close to useless except in the simplest of embedded devices or to replace 10 lines of code in a loop
It depends on the application area, though I would say that the ability to read ASM (so that you can tune the compiler output) is far more important than the ability to write it.
What kinds of programming do you do?
I tend to work close to the hardware/software boundary. In terms of programming tasks, that means I use C/ASM for driver and firmware coding, Haskell for toolchain development (compilers, etc) and algorithm research, Verilog for sizing small hardware fragments, and automatically generated C++ template stacks for architectural modelling (half a million lines of template code that collapses down to a single object instance).
the number of C/C++ programmers dwarfs the number of pure C programmers.
It's probably accurate to say that the number of people writing C/C++ code dwarfs the number of people writing pure C code. Whether the majority of the former group can be counted as programmers is another issue entirely ;-)
Disclaimer: I write in asm, C, or Haskell, or the code I write does. Low-level for performance, high-level for abstraction. The stuff in the middle is the worse of both worlds. And I still can't decide whether Java is obscene or just amusing.
You're missing the entire point. An opaque piece of cloth has many uses. What would you use the drugs for it not to intoxicate yourself, thereby endangering both yourself and others?
And you're taking something used as a simple illustration of an argument and mistaking it for the whole argument. If you want a better but messier, try this: if I drive down the street to pick up a DVD rental, I am running a (very slight) risk of injuring another human being for no more reason than my own pleasure. My pleasure has no "use" to anyone else, so why should I be allowed to drive a motor vehicle for anything other than essential purposes?
Furthermore, the psychological ramifications of using an artificial substance to stimulate/depress your brain in order to create/depress emotions are all absolutely detrimental to your health.
Agreed, and I've seen it first-hand as well. But banning a substance because of its effects on non-users is a very different kettle of fish to banning it because of its effects on people who knowingly consume it. I don't believe I own anyone else's body, and I don't believe that anyone else owns mine.
You're arguing the freedom to use substances which take away your freedom.
Yes, you could put it that way. But I also claim that using such substances does not take away your responsibility for your actions. Saying that "the drugs made me do it" is as much nonsense as "God made me do it".
Perhaps you should get off the drugs long enough for your frontal lobe to develop - you know, the part of your head which deals in high-level cognitive areas like foresight and long-range planning.
I quit cigarettes 4 months ago, if that's what you mean. The only other mind-altering substances I use are beer once in a while and a small quantity of high fructose corn syrup when working late.
Vast majority huh? I'd ask you to back that up,
Well, let's see. For Marijuana alone, 57% of adults aged 19-28 admit to having used it at some point in their lives . I think that it's safe to say that the vast majority of those people have not harmed another human being due to their drug use - if it were otherwise society would have completely collapsed by now.
but we both know when arguing pro-drugs you have to use the words "vast" and "majority" to sound persuasive, like the "vast majority" who are pro-drugs really need an argument anyway. Maybe the "itty-bitty minority" might need the argument though so we'll be that much closer to a drug utopia. Although why you all feel drugs are so needed that evolution forgot to include them in your design is a complete mystery.
You should slow down and read what people have written before responding. I never claimed that the "vast majority" of people were pro-drugs and I didn't even claim that drugs were needed.
It's been released, though for some reason their marketing folks are calling it "Vista".
Yes, when parents don't feed their children because they need drug money, its a victimless crime, no one other than the parent is hurt!
No, it's child abuse, just the same as if they spent the children's money on a trip to Vegas. That doesn't mean that staying in a luxury hotel or selling someone an airline ticket is or should be a crime.
When people cant think properly because they've taken too many drugs
No, it's criminal negligence, just the same as if they put on a blindfold and got into their car. That doesn't mean that owning opaque pieces of cloth should be a crime.
People dealing drugs to others, even when the others haven't been shown how dangerous the drugs are, is a victimless crime. The people who recieved the drugs certainly weren't hurt!
If you choose to consent to something, you aren't a victim of it. Now, there might be a small minority that were addicted by someone else, in which case they are victims, but most people who use drugs choose to do so.
(And so on for the other examples)
Honestly, I could care less about the people who know the risks, and still use the drugs to the point of harming themselves. It's those that use them and harm others in the process, that bother me.
The vast majority of drug users don't harm others. For the minority that do, harming others is already a crime, so punish them for that.
What I never see is how far the average person that does drive their vehicle over there has to drive.
chooses to drive, surely? Nothing stops "the average person" living equally close to wherever it is they wish to drive to.
What's happening to the tax money we're already paying?
From memory - I'd have to go hunting to find the actual papers and I can't be bothered at this time on a Saturday night - gasoline in the US retails for about 17% below its actual cost, where actual cost includes road maintenance, increased healthcare costs, pollution cleanup, oil company subsidies, etc. The tax money we're already paying to drive is less than the externalized cost of driving.
In Europe, it's about 40% above actual cost. The other thing that folks in the US forget is that due to the massive increase in national debt, the dollar has dropped in value. In other words gas hasn't got that much more expensive in "absolute" terms - dollars have become worth less due to US govt policies.
Physical units? Really? How fast is your 4Mbps internet connection?
A second is a physical unit. If it weren't, the meaning of "4Mbps" would be defined by convention, not diktat.
Oh, that's right, you are just full of it with that "physical unit" garbage.
No, I'm pointing out the limited scope of SI. Assuming that its scope extends beyond that defined for it is ignorant. Having information allows people to make informed decisions and judge an argument accurately.
Saying that M is defined to be 10^6 only for physical units is not saying that M is 10^6 only for physical units. What it is saying is that we are free to define it to optimise for global consistency or for local utility.
I'm on the side of local utility, you are on the side of global consistency. That's fine. All I am saying is that bringing SI definitions into the argument as the voice of authority is intellectually dishonest as the scope of SI does not extend to bytes.
Firstly, the 'mega' prefix (for example) was defined to mean 10^6
Well, it was defined as such only in the context of SI physical units, which do not include bytes.
Although people have much later tried to define it with respect to bytes as well, there are a large number of people (including myself) who regard this as unwanted interference with something that has worked very well for the majority of the lifetime of the computing field. It has increased confusion, not reduced it, because prior to this mebi-rubbish, usage was unequivocally determined by context.
I decided to quit smoking a couple of days ago, and coffee is a "trigger".
Just cleared four months smoke-free today. Stayed away from bars for the first couple of months, still don't dare get screamingly drunk yet. It's worth it though - I just got myself a Roomba and a $400 bottle of whisky out of the cash I've saved, let alone all the health stuff. Stick it out, it stops getting worse after the first week.
Ford doesn't sue the soccer mom that drives a Chevy Suburban if the Suburban violates patents Ford owns - Ford sues Chevy.
Ah, but what would be a far more interesting variation would be IBM or Sun or some other large hardware company with an extensive patent portfolio suing Microsoft for using patent infringing chips in the computers it uses to carry out its day-to-day business and getting an injunction stopping Microsoft from powering on even a single computer for several weeks. Wouldn't that be a delight to see...
Maybe they're so secretive because looking at a full spec or at the code to the driver would show clearly that they are infringing on each other's patents.
All the GPU manufacturers have cross-license deals with each other. You can't make a GPU without permission from all of the incumbents.