All of my own web pages still start with "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">>", which I consider just about the last thing the W3C did of any significance to the rest of the world outside their own little social/political clique.
Actually, I tend to think of that as the first sign that they'd gone off the rails. Since all HTML docs started with <HTML> already, the doctype is a pointless piece of text. The correct modification would have been to allow <HTML version="3.2"> instead. I mean, what type of document did they expect to find inside HTML tags?
Tons of links to questionable articles from all over the Internet, filled with POV content and unverifiable original research, and generally achieving no community consensus on anything.
You make that sound like a bad thing. The problem with Wikipedia is that it doesn't have a POV, it will not allow experts in the field to contribute without throwing out "original research" and - worst of all - that it thinks community consensus is a substitute for the truth. As to linking to questionable articles from all over the Internet, Wikipedia IS the standard repository for questionable articles on the Internet. If you ever want to be 50% sure of something, look it up on Wikipedia.
Single editors with their own POV are actually better than Wiki's awful "Is this true? Let's have a show of hands." approach which only cements a POV by demographics while removing any sense of responsibility or accountability from the process.
Wikipedia is like MMORPGs: when I first heard of them I thought they would be great. Turns out they're both just a big old pile of arseholes building the lowest common denominator.
WGA exists because unscrupulous PC manufacturers / PC builders will sell PCs with improperly licensed copies of Windows. i.e. they'll pay for one copy and install it on every computer they sell.
But if that's unscrupulous, then what do you call OS companies that force people to pay for licences to programs they don't want or, in extreme cases, can't even install? I forget the exact number of computers sold this way, but it's huge. It's also the cornerstone of Microsoft's business plan.
Of course, the solution to both is to force all computers to be sold without an OS pre-installed. Buy the computer, buy an install disc, go home and boot the machine with the disc in the drive (alright, reboot - you do have to get the drawer open). There you go: free market! MS can install any sort of anti-piracy they like on their install disc and no one has to pay for anything they don't want. Plus, we can all make a fortune selling MS stocks short.
TWW
Re:I find Mr. Feldzamen's post hard to believe.
on
The Fallacy of Hard Tests
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If anything, the low pass rate of bar exams, typically 50% or less among a candidate pool of mostly recent law school grads, suggests that they are very hard indeeed.
It doesn't actually suggest anything other than 50% of people that apply pass. I can design an exam which is very easy; I then say that only 50% will pass. It could be that the "cut" is anyone who scored 9+ out of ten will pass and everyone else fails. Or I could flip a coin. The pass rate is no guide to how hard an exam is nor how good a test of the candidates' abilities. It might be both hard and rigorous, but you can't infer that just from the pass rate.
Wake me up when the ISPs actually have the bandwidth to do this without kicking me for downloading a day's worth of broadcast quality programming. Sometime arount 2015 should do.
I'm tired of all the 1-second-till-end phantom biding programs and online services screwing me over.
Bid slightly over what you want to pay and then forget it; that's the secret to eBay. If you get the item, then fine. If not, then at least you haven't paid more than you wanted to. The system you're suggesting would be abused sideways to Sunday.
Personally, I'd like to see the end of "Buy it now" (although not because of a lame patent). I came for an auction, not a row of bloody Hong Kong shops.
Um, the US did bring democracy to Iraq in the form of an Iraqi-elected government that is relatively favorable to US interests.
When the candidates are vetted by the US, it's hard to call the result "democracy". But, then, given how complete the aristocracy's grip on power in the US is, it's hard to call it a democracy either.
At the end of the day, whoever is in power in Iraq, the oil is going to the US and that's what counts; none of the ruling elite have to worry about their kids getting killed, just like GWB got to hide away from Vietnam.
If she thinks there was only a 70% chance of regime change in the early part of the Iraq shambles then she needs to go back and see where she dropped that other 30%.
If you want a much better insight into that period, place and people, read "Harpo Speaks!", the autobiography of Harpo Marx. It's a lot funnier, a lot more interesting, has a better story, and is about people you might actually give a flying fuck about.
One of the prevailing theories of how the Cold War was fought by the US was that Reagan forced the USSR into a spending race, and caused the USSR to bankrupt themselves.
Yeah, that's believable. Regan was an incompetant old duffer who happened to be sitting under the tree when the apple fell. It's true that part of the reason it collapsed was the decades of wasting time and money worrying about threats from America, but really the Soviet Union collapsed because it was shite and utterly inefficient. Regan got lucky and claimed the credit.
In a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to national security,
The number never mattered except to hide it from the electorate. An itemised list of what it was spent on, now, that would have been an issue of national security.
Unfortunately, just scanning a work means that the scan itself has a copyright.
This is not the case in the UK, and the example of museums making posters for sale in the shop is a particular case where it has been ruled that there is no copyright in the resulting poster. As you say, the reason cameras are not allowed in many well-lit galleries where flash is not an issue is to try to keep those poster/book sales up. However, this rule is not as common in the UK as the US.
Presumably you need someone to write down nice clear instructions for you, because otherwise you find it just too difficult to deal with the real world.
Yes, because contracts (you know, writing something down so everyone knows what's been agreed) are not part of how business has been conducted since Sumerian times. How unreasonable for me to expect such an outlandish notion to have any application in your fantasy world.
The GPL also places obligations upon people using GPL software. Those apply whether or not you sign a piece of paper. This is a good thing. Do try and keep up
The GPL does no such thing. Copyright law places obligations, and these do apply whether or not you sign a piece of paper because it is the law. The GPL releases obligations under certain circumstances, it even does it in writing. That is why your signiture is not needed. Why do people find this so hard to understand?
There was a year of discussions.
After the fact. Who cares? Microsoft's EULA has no more bearing than if he had written an extension to Acrobat.
You need to take a look at things like this: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?artid=123103. The issue with the precambrian period is not that stuff suddenly appeared, but that some features that make fossilisation more likely (or easier to detect) appeared. There is now quite a large body of work showing that life and evolution was running just fine before the Cambrian explosion.
Philsophically, I cannot see that being untestable or even hard-to-test by itself makes something less likely to be true.
But it does reduce it to being a philosophical geegaw and no more insightful than "perhaps I'm dreaming all this". Maybe I am, but if you want to go down that route there is no point in discussing anything or attempting to find out anything about the world around us since (as with gods) it is all arbitary and nothing can be "known" at all.
You mean the only "known" alternative. There may be possibilities we haven't considered yet.
A very good point and one many scientists forget. Science can only disprove something; it is almost impossible to prove anything because one would need some way of knowing that all possible explanations had been considered. At the macroscopic level that is impossible, although there may be some minute, very well controlled, conditions where it is - but I doubt it.
Nevertheless, we can disprove things and once an explanation has been discarded start to look for new candidate explanations from the available evidence. The evidence, both logical and factual, for evolution is enormous and almost overwhelming, from DNA to fossils to farming to experiments. There may be another explanation for the diversity of life but it requires more than simply stating that possibility before one can say that you have a right to be taken as seriously as a theory that has stood the test of time as well as evolution.
But, I heartily agree that scientist should be more careful of dismissing alternatives out of hand, even if they are entirely justified in saying "come back when you have some evidence". Intelligent design, for example, is obvious bunk and offers no evidence nor explanation; it is simply religion. But Lamarkism seems slightly less silly now that we understand some of the odd quirks of biology, such as animals who "decide" on the sex ratio that is needed for their next cluch of offspring. Molecular biology has shown us that mechanisms are available for natural selection to work with that would have been dismissed out of hand fifty years ago, when they should only have been labeled "no known mechanism" and left on the shelf where continental drift once sat.
But, the core idea of Darwin's theory is a beautiful and clear one: if a population has variety in it, and characteristics can be passed on to offspring, then those particular varieties which thrive better in a given environment will tend to increase in numbers over successive generations. This is a logical argument which applies beyond the realm of biology and even without fossils or DNA analysis it is a very tough wall for evolution-deniers to break down.
On that subject, what do you actually have in mind when you say "Creationists being careless is not a free pass for evo's to do the same"? What sort of carelessness are you thinking of?
Small change X may not necessarily lead to large change Y
True, but given the nature of entropy the only real alternative is some sort of ever-decreasing circles where each change is smaller and smaller and the sum of the series is limited. That is fantasiticly unlikely and anyway it does not address the real issue which is that the difference between small changes and bog changes is subjective; there is no inherent way to divide the two classes. The reason for that is simple: there is no division and no reason to believe that there is some arbitary barrier between the two.
"Possible" and "is" are not necessarily the same.
That's right, but I was pointing out that time is central to the concept of evolution and not some sort of excuse.
The evidence for evolution had been around for a long time and had even been commented on before Darwin, but without the geological evidence for deep time it could not be fitted into our overall picture of the universe, just as the geology had to fight against the lack of nucear theory and was only finally accepted once the heat source of the Sun was revealed.
And none of this addresses the real point which is: gods are silly, silly, childish notions with no evidence whatsoever to support them. Even if we know nothing about evolution or geology that would not suddenly reveal any grounds for replacing that understanding with gods of any ilk. Saying "god" is exactly equal to saying "don't know", although much less honest, of course.
In my point of view, the "evolution as guided by God" has far fewer problems than other explanations; but is also the greatest cop-out, solving none of the problems. But at least it recognizes, rather than glosses over, the problems which exist.
By introducing a whole raft of new complications, none of which address any of the essential gaps in our knowledge? Gods demand explanations just as much as what we can see; moreso because we can not see the gods.
Your understanding of the cambrian is about 30 years out of date.
Evo has not been demonstrated making large-scale complicated life-forms under full, controlled, and repeatable observation.
And gods have been so demonstrated? I must have missed that one.
Incrimental changes do not necessarily equal large changes.
Incremental changes times a million generations do.
Making a beak grow larger is not the same as making brains and immune systems.
Why?
"Time ate my homework" is not good enough.
Actually, it is. In fact, it is the central concept that makes evolution work and that's why the current crop of fairytale believers are so keen to deny deep-time and push the young earth nonsense. They know that the one thing that does make evolution possible - and obviously possible to even fairly dull people - is the huge timescales geologists uncovered in the late 1700s and early 1800s. If they can get people to doubt that then they can shift them off evolution, science, and rational thought, and get them to post money for quack miracles performed on daytime TV. Which, ultimately is what all organised religion is about when you get down to it.
Time, in this case, not only ate your homework, it is your homework.
Perhaps you missed the regular conference calls in the email thread?
They are irrelevant as they happened after - long after - the fact of the so-called agreement. You have those discussions before a legal agreement. They are doubly irrelevant since the developer did nothing other than write his own program in his own time. Nothing Microsoft can say or do short of a real, signed and preferably witnessed, contract can bind him from doing that.
If you are going to do business with M$, work in the spirit of their business model.
That's an insane way of working because "the spirit" is subjective and the company's interpretation of it can change with each new senior manager.
Look at the GPL - no signatures required, self-declaration not a problem
Yes, you don't need someone's agreement to give them more rights than the law entitles them to, which is what the GPL does. You do need something more than that in order to take someone's legal rights away, which is what Microsoft is trying to do here.
Take your double standards elsewhere.
Sorry this is all so complicated for you.
The removal of the Add-In Manager is a technical limitation of the Express edition. Replacing it with your own code is arguably trying to "work around any technical limitations in the software", a breach of the license condition
That's fair enough insofar that it lets Microsoft remove the guy's future access to their resources. He has breached the rules of a private club. But he has done nothing illegal because no genuine contract existed. The software he has written breaks no law and there is no legal force in Microsoft's demand that he withdraw it; it's his and not theirs and that's the end of it. Microsoft is perfectly entitled to throw a hissy fit and change future releases to block his program and, as I say, deny him access to their resources, but that's all.
The "license agreement" holds no more legal force than the signs in Australian shopping malls that say they will search your bag on exit - they have no legal right to do so but they can refuse to let you back in if you don't let them; if they required you to sign an agreenment on the way in then there would be some legal force. This is exactly the same situation and it is important that we all prevent the situation arising where private companies and clubs are allowed to re-write the law on a whim. If you can't see how dangerous that is for everyone then you must be blind.
Or, work in the spirit of Microsoft's business model.
What are you on? Microsoft - and all other large companies - make no recognition of the concept of "the spirit" of anything. The written word, and what you can get a judge to believe the words mean, is all that counts. If you're going to deal with them on the basis of the spirit of their business model you might as well give yourself a nice open wound and jump into the shark tank at Sea World.
So the license wasn't clear, but M$ spent a lot of time explaining their point of view.
Yeah, well, their view is their view. There are two people in this thing and no point of law give one's POV precedence over the other, and that's good if you pause for a moment and think about the devastating effects on consumers it would have if a company was allowed to review their contracts' meanings after the fact.
The bigger issue here is that, as far as I can see, there is in fact no legal stance of any kind. Microsoft's software has not been changed by the developer in any way and no contract existed (at least, no real contract with signitures, consideration and all that tiresome legal stuff that Microsoft ignores when it suits them to) so really there is no "legal arrangement" of any kind other than the concept of ownership. Copyright has not been broken and as far as I can see no trade law or contract law has relevance. Obviously, MS can pay a team of lawyers to argue otherwise until the heat death of the universe but that's just using the courts to bully through your own arbitrary view with no regard to the legalities of either party's actions.
The courts may therefore conclude that although Jamie has not committed such a blatant breach of contract that M$ can claim damages, he has violated the clear intent of the Express edition and must therefore restrain from offering TestDriven for Visual Studio Express.
I very much doubt that the English courts would see it that way since Microsoft has no contract to show as evidence and has consistantly refused to show what part of their self-declared license was breached by these actions.
No wrong, either legal or moral, appears to have been done, and no damage has accrued to Microsoft except by their own unreasonable beahviour which is making it clear just how hostile to outside programmers they can be if those programmers show more skill than Microsoft's own bunch of third-raters.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I tend to think of that as the first sign that they'd gone off the rails. Since all HTML docs started with <HTML> already, the doctype is a pointless piece of text. The correct modification would have been to allow <HTML version="3.2"> instead. I mean, what type of document did they expect to find inside HTML tags?
TWW
You make that sound like a bad thing. The problem with Wikipedia is that it doesn't have a POV, it will not allow experts in the field to contribute without throwing out "original research" and - worst of all - that it thinks community consensus is a substitute for the truth. As to linking to questionable articles from all over the Internet, Wikipedia IS the standard repository for questionable articles on the Internet. If you ever want to be 50% sure of something, look it up on Wikipedia.
Single editors with their own POV are actually better than Wiki's awful "Is this true? Let's have a show of hands." approach which only cements a POV by demographics while removing any sense of responsibility or accountability from the process.
Wikipedia is like MMORPGs: when I first heard of them I thought they would be great. Turns out they're both just a big old pile of arseholes building the lowest common denominator.
But if that's unscrupulous, then what do you call OS companies that force people to pay for licences to programs they don't want or, in extreme cases, can't even install? I forget the exact number of computers sold this way, but it's huge. It's also the cornerstone of Microsoft's business plan.
Of course, the solution to both is to force all computers to be sold without an OS pre-installed. Buy the computer, buy an install disc, go home and boot the machine with the disc in the drive (alright, reboot - you do have to get the drawer open). There you go: free market! MS can install any sort of anti-piracy they like on their install disc and no one has to pay for anything they don't want. Plus, we can all make a fortune selling MS stocks short.
TWW
It doesn't actually suggest anything other than 50% of people that apply pass. I can design an exam which is very easy; I then say that only 50% will pass. It could be that the "cut" is anyone who scored 9+ out of ten will pass and everyone else fails. Or I could flip a coin. The pass rate is no guide to how hard an exam is nor how good a test of the candidates' abilities. It might be both hard and rigorous, but you can't infer that just from the pass rate.
TWW
You are too kind; I just did what any pedantic git would have done in my place.
TWW
Perhaps to check the spelling of "to"?
TWW
Bid slightly over what you want to pay and then forget it; that's the secret to eBay. If you get the item, then fine. If not, then at least you haven't paid more than you wanted to. The system you're suggesting would be abused sideways to Sunday.
Personally, I'd like to see the end of "Buy it now" (although not because of a lame patent). I came for an auction, not a row of bloody Hong Kong shops.
TWW
When the candidates are vetted by the US, it's hard to call the result "democracy". But, then, given how complete the aristocracy's grip on power in the US is, it's hard to call it a democracy either.
At the end of the day, whoever is in power in Iraq, the oil is going to the US and that's what counts; none of the ruling elite have to worry about their kids getting killed, just like GWB got to hide away from Vietnam.
TWW
TWW
Certainly not the case in English English; I don't know if it's true in American English.
Do not listen to this man! The Great Gatsby is dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, dull, and uninteresting too.
If you want a much better insight into that period, place and people, read "Harpo Speaks!", the autobiography of Harpo Marx. It's a lot funnier, a lot more interesting, has a better story, and is about people you might actually give a flying fuck about.
TWW
Yeah, that's believable. Regan was an incompetant old duffer who happened to be sitting under the tree when the apple fell. It's true that part of the reason it collapsed was the decades of wasting time and money worrying about threats from America, but really the Soviet Union collapsed because it was shite and utterly inefficient. Regan got lucky and claimed the credit.
TWW
The number never mattered except to hide it from the electorate. An itemised list of what it was spent on, now, that would have been an issue of national security.
This is not the case in the UK, and the example of museums making posters for sale in the shop is a particular case where it has been ruled that there is no copyright in the resulting poster. As you say, the reason cameras are not allowed in many well-lit galleries where flash is not an issue is to try to keep those poster/book sales up. However, this rule is not as common in the UK as the US.
TWW
Presumably you need someone to write down nice clear instructions for you, because otherwise you find it just too difficult to deal with the real world.
Yes, because contracts (you know, writing something down so everyone knows what's been agreed) are not part of how business has been conducted since Sumerian times. How unreasonable for me to expect such an outlandish notion to have any application in your fantasy world.
The GPL also places obligations upon people using GPL software. Those apply whether or not you sign a piece of paper. This is a good thing. Do try and keep up
The GPL does no such thing. Copyright law places obligations, and these do apply whether or not you sign a piece of paper because it is the law. The GPL releases obligations under certain circumstances, it even does it in writing. That is why your signiture is not needed. Why do people find this so hard to understand?
There was a year of discussions.
After the fact. Who cares? Microsoft's EULA has no more bearing than if he had written an extension to Acrobat.
TWW
You need to take a look at things like this: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?artid=123103. The issue with the precambrian period is not that stuff suddenly appeared, but that some features that make fossilisation more likely (or easier to detect) appeared. There is now quite a large body of work showing that life and evolution was running just fine before the Cambrian explosion.
But it does reduce it to being a philosophical geegaw and no more insightful than "perhaps I'm dreaming all this". Maybe I am, but if you want to go down that route there is no point in discussing anything or attempting to find out anything about the world around us since (as with gods) it is all arbitary and nothing can be "known" at all.
TWW
A very good point and one many scientists forget. Science can only disprove something; it is almost impossible to prove anything because one would need some way of knowing that all possible explanations had been considered. At the macroscopic level that is impossible, although there may be some minute, very well controlled, conditions where it is - but I doubt it.
Nevertheless, we can disprove things and once an explanation has been discarded start to look for new candidate explanations from the available evidence. The evidence, both logical and factual, for evolution is enormous and almost overwhelming, from DNA to fossils to farming to experiments. There may be another explanation for the diversity of life but it requires more than simply stating that possibility before one can say that you have a right to be taken as seriously as a theory that has stood the test of time as well as evolution.
But, I heartily agree that scientist should be more careful of dismissing alternatives out of hand, even if they are entirely justified in saying "come back when you have some evidence". Intelligent design, for example, is obvious bunk and offers no evidence nor explanation; it is simply religion. But Lamarkism seems slightly less silly now that we understand some of the odd quirks of biology, such as animals who "decide" on the sex ratio that is needed for their next cluch of offspring. Molecular biology has shown us that mechanisms are available for natural selection to work with that would have been dismissed out of hand fifty years ago, when they should only have been labeled "no known mechanism" and left on the shelf where continental drift once sat.
But, the core idea of Darwin's theory is a beautiful and clear one: if a population has variety in it, and characteristics can be passed on to offspring, then those particular varieties which thrive better in a given environment will tend to increase in numbers over successive generations. This is a logical argument which applies beyond the realm of biology and even without fossils or DNA analysis it is a very tough wall for evolution-deniers to break down.
On that subject, what do you actually have in mind when you say "Creationists being careless is not a free pass for evo's to do the same"? What sort of carelessness are you thinking of?
TWW
A link might have been helpful.
Small change X may not necessarily lead to large change Y
True, but given the nature of entropy the only real alternative is some sort of ever-decreasing circles where each change is smaller and smaller and the sum of the series is limited. That is fantasiticly unlikely and anyway it does not address the real issue which is that the difference between small changes and bog changes is subjective; there is no inherent way to divide the two classes. The reason for that is simple: there is no division and no reason to believe that there is some arbitary barrier between the two.
"Possible" and "is" are not necessarily the same.
That's right, but I was pointing out that time is central to the concept of evolution and not some sort of excuse.
The evidence for evolution had been around for a long time and had even been commented on before Darwin, but without the geological evidence for deep time it could not be fitted into our overall picture of the universe, just as the geology had to fight against the lack of nucear theory and was only finally accepted once the heat source of the Sun was revealed.
And none of this addresses the real point which is: gods are silly, silly, childish notions with no evidence whatsoever to support them. Even if we know nothing about evolution or geology that would not suddenly reveal any grounds for replacing that understanding with gods of any ilk. Saying "god" is exactly equal to saying "don't know", although much less honest, of course.
TWW
By introducing a whole raft of new complications, none of which address any of the essential gaps in our knowledge? Gods demand explanations just as much as what we can see; moreso because we can not see the gods.
Evo has not been demonstrated making large-scale complicated life-forms under full, controlled, and repeatable observation.
And gods have been so demonstrated? I must have missed that one.
Incrimental changes do not necessarily equal large changes.
Incremental changes times a million generations do.
Making a beak grow larger is not the same as making brains and immune systems.
Why?
"Time ate my homework" is not good enough.
Actually, it is. In fact, it is the central concept that makes evolution work and that's why the current crop of fairytale believers are so keen to deny deep-time and push the young earth nonsense. They know that the one thing that does make evolution possible - and obviously possible to even fairly dull people - is the huge timescales geologists uncovered in the late 1700s and early 1800s. If they can get people to doubt that then they can shift them off evolution, science, and rational thought, and get them to post money for quack miracles performed on daytime TV. Which, ultimately is what all organised religion is about when you get down to it.
Time, in this case, not only ate your homework, it is your homework.
TWW
Novell have a lot to answer for.
TWW
They are irrelevant as they happened after - long after - the fact of the so-called agreement. You have those discussions before a legal agreement. They are doubly irrelevant since the developer did nothing other than write his own program in his own time. Nothing Microsoft can say or do short of a real, signed and preferably witnessed, contract can bind him from doing that.
If you are going to do business with M$, work in the spirit of their business model.
That's an insane way of working because "the spirit" is subjective and the company's interpretation of it can change with each new senior manager.
Look at the GPL - no signatures required, self-declaration not a problem
Yes, you don't need someone's agreement to give them more rights than the law entitles them to, which is what the GPL does. You do need something more than that in order to take someone's legal rights away, which is what Microsoft is trying to do here.
Take your double standards elsewhere.
Sorry this is all so complicated for you.
The removal of the Add-In Manager is a technical limitation of the Express edition. Replacing it with your own code is arguably trying to "work around any technical limitations in the software", a breach of the license condition
That's fair enough insofar that it lets Microsoft remove the guy's future access to their resources. He has breached the rules of a private club. But he has done nothing illegal because no genuine contract existed. The software he has written breaks no law and there is no legal force in Microsoft's demand that he withdraw it; it's his and not theirs and that's the end of it. Microsoft is perfectly entitled to throw a hissy fit and change future releases to block his program and, as I say, deny him access to their resources, but that's all.
The "license agreement" holds no more legal force than the signs in Australian shopping malls that say they will search your bag on exit - they have no legal right to do so but they can refuse to let you back in if you don't let them; if they required you to sign an agreenment on the way in then there would be some legal force. This is exactly the same situation and it is important that we all prevent the situation arising where private companies and clubs are allowed to re-write the law on a whim. If you can't see how dangerous that is for everyone then you must be blind.
TWW
What are you on? Microsoft - and all other large companies - make no recognition of the concept of "the spirit" of anything. The written word, and what you can get a judge to believe the words mean, is all that counts. If you're going to deal with them on the basis of the spirit of their business model you might as well give yourself a nice open wound and jump into the shark tank at Sea World.
So the license wasn't clear, but M$ spent a lot of time explaining their point of view.
Yeah, well, their view is their view. There are two people in this thing and no point of law give one's POV precedence over the other, and that's good if you pause for a moment and think about the devastating effects on consumers it would have if a company was allowed to review their contracts' meanings after the fact.
The bigger issue here is that, as far as I can see, there is in fact no legal stance of any kind. Microsoft's software has not been changed by the developer in any way and no contract existed (at least, no real contract with signitures, consideration and all that tiresome legal stuff that Microsoft ignores when it suits them to) so really there is no "legal arrangement" of any kind other than the concept of ownership. Copyright has not been broken and as far as I can see no trade law or contract law has relevance. Obviously, MS can pay a team of lawyers to argue otherwise until the heat death of the universe but that's just using the courts to bully through your own arbitrary view with no regard to the legalities of either party's actions.
The courts may therefore conclude that although Jamie has not committed such a blatant breach of contract that M$ can claim damages, he has violated the clear intent of the Express edition and must therefore restrain from offering TestDriven for Visual Studio Express.
I very much doubt that the English courts would see it that way since Microsoft has no contract to show as evidence and has consistantly refused to show what part of their self-declared license was breached by these actions.
No wrong, either legal or moral, appears to have been done, and no damage has accrued to Microsoft except by their own unreasonable beahviour which is making it clear just how hostile to outside programmers they can be if those programmers show more skill than Microsoft's own bunch of third-raters.
TWW