Go back and read the second paragraph of my post. In particular, read the last sentence. And in case you still don't get it, I'll spell it out for you:
STATEMENTS ABOUT GROUPS CANNOT BE REFUTED BY STATEMENTS ABOUT INDIVIDUALS.
You know many Democrats. Do you know at least 1500 of them? Because if you don't, you can't base ANY valid statement about the beliefs of the group based on your acquaintances. Frankly, if you don't know why I say "1500", you aren't qualified to say ANYTHING about the opinions of large groups, unless you are quoting someone else's statistical study.
Now, if you'd like to quote a statistical study to prove me wrong, feel free to do so.
Its only natural that they would move people on to an open browser.
Except that they could have done this anytime in the past three years or so. While I'm sure that the freeness of the browser is a plus, I suspect that they taken this step for purely pragmatic reasons: lower support costs. Those that disagree are invited to offer a convincing argument that IBM wouldn't switch to a proprietary browser that had significantly lower (read: "zero") support costs than FireFox.
Anecdotal evidence. The typical Texas Democrat supports the death penalty, opposes abortion, and owns guns. In majority Democrat states, such a person could be expected to vote Republican. A Texas Democrat may be a union worker, a trial lawyer, or a historically oppressed racial minority; these are all Democrat constituencies. You are correct that you ARE a democrat, but in other communities, you might find you have more in common with Republicans. By the same token, I would expect the typical Massachusetts Republican to vote Democrat in Texas.
If I may be permitted a tiny flame, I'd suggest that you don't distinguish between statistical statements about groups of people and categorical statements about each member of a group of people. While the latter is fallacious, the former is not. Granted, they are easily confused, and bigots often pretend to say the former when they mean the latter. However, in intelligent discourse, it is important to realize that statistical statements CANNOT be refuted by anecdotes. "The averate 4-year-old can't read" is true, no matter how many gifted four-year-olds you might find.
Frank Herbert has this to say about your experience:
"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? That's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind." - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
Your anecdote is a perfect example of why evil prospers in this world. Great evil prospers because small evils are left unchecked. Never miss an opportunity to force people to confront the fact that what they are doing is evil. Never miss an opportunity to force evildoers to face the consequences of their actions. Failure to do so is not merely inaction; it is encouragement of evil. In your case, you permitted your boss to profit by exactly the amount that he withheld from you.
Yeah, yeah, I'm taking it too seriously and stomping all over your largely reasonable advice. Call it an effect of what's happened in my life and my foul mood today. But at least think about what I said.
It's a little frustrating to realize, but I guess the cost of maintaining an intelligent, civilized society is a constant battle against ignorance.
Let me paraphrase: It's a little frustrating to realize, but I guess the cost of maintaining an free society is a constant battle against outside interference.
Are you a registered voter in the state of Kansas? NO? Then any action you take to influence the politics of the state of Kansas is an attempt to subvert democracy.
I don't know about you, but I value my freedom more than I value knowledge. By analogy, I value a $100 bill more than a $50 bill. Both are necessary to buy the $150 stereo, but the $100 bill is more important to the purchase. The Germans under Hitler arguably had a better science than the Americans. Their vehicles and weapons were better engineered. They build ballistic missiles, for crying out loud. Many of the most important scientists on the Manhattan project came from Germany. And why did they leave? They thought it more important to live in a free society than a well-educated one.
So let the Kansans perform their little experiment. Is it stupid? Yes. Will it hurt them? Almost certainly. Is interfering worse than enforcing education? I believe so.
A parting shot: the argument that "We know more" was used extensively during the Age of Exploration to justify the political suppression of non-European peoples. What makes you different?If you're not a voter, and you're not subpoenaed by the elected representatives of the voters, then you have no business interfering.
(As for the rest of your post...I like your analysis of the differing views of facts and theory. Food for thought - most interesting thing I've read here all week.)
Nope. 64.8% is the upper limit, but I wouldn't expect such a figure to be off by more than 10%, though. From the information you present, though, all we know for certaion is that the literacy rate is greater than 0% and less than 64.8%.
While common or "garden" mercury is quite familiar to element watchers, a far more rewarding sight is the rare "mercury of paradise." Element watchers are dying in droves to see this incredible manifestation of mercury.
Apple Records didn't have a trademark dispute. They had a contract dispute. Apple had contractual obligated themselves (ie they had promised) not to ever enter the music business.
Then they entered the music business.
There was no question of trademark involved; it was all about the contract.
it is odd for them to wait until now to try and halt such a heralded product.
Not odd at all, for a few reasons. Only upper management (let's call them the CxOs) would have the corporate clout to initiate a lawsuit against a big-name corp like Apple. Consider the following hypothetical scenarios:
1. Prior Apple products have had internal code names that were used in a semi-public way. (The Sagan/BHA saga comes to mind.) The CxOs thought Tiger was just such a code name, and, being clueless as only management can be, didn't realize until this late that it was not the case.
2. The CxOs, being clueless as only management can be, hadn't heard of Apple's "Tiger" until now.
3. The CxOs, realizing that this was an open-and-shut case, figured they'd give Apple enough rope to hang themselves. They're all expert blackmailers - sorry, "negotiators" - and know that Apple is now facing a time crunch. Apple has a hard deadline and must settle on Tiger Direct's terms.
Don't know about you, but #3 strikes me as really plausible. I don't know if that makes me cynical or just experienced, but I don't see Tiger's behavior as odd, in the sense of "statistically unusual".
Some have suggested that having a "good enough" 911 service for VOIP is acceptable. In other words, if 95% of VOIP users are actually just using it as a cheap local phone replacement, then it's OK to have the other 5% die because the paramedics can't find them. I disagree with this line of thinking. This kind of emergency service needs to be either 100% guaranteed, or advertised as not available at all.
I would prefer to see legislation that demanded truth in advertising. Customers should be required to sign a release that says (in a 24-point font):
"911 DON'T WORK ON MY NEW PHONE. I CAN'T CALL THE COPS ON MY NEW PHONE. I CAN'T CALL AN AMBULANCE ON MY NEW PHONE. I CAN'T CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT ON MY NEW PHONE."
If people have been hurt because VOIP providers didn't GUARANTEE that their customers didn't understand that the new technology could put them at risk in an emergency, then I'd say hang the CxOs from the nearest telephone pole as a warning to the rest. If customers knew EXACTLY what they were getting, then the government is interfering with the private business of consenting adults.
When you call 911 the "regular way", you don't get your local coffee shop's 911 service
You are pedantically correct but completely wrong within the framework of this discussion.
When you call 911 from the local coffee shop, the 911 operator knows you are at the local coffee shop. She may even know where in the building the extension you're on is located. The point is not what 911 call center answers your phone; the point is that the operator sees on screen the exact location of the phone you're calling from. That simply isn't possible for a mobile user of VOIP.
If the ambulance goes to the wrong address, you're still dead. If you're passed out on the floor in the building next to where the paramedics are knocking down the door, you're going to die. If you aren't where they expect you, they aren't going door-to-door to find you, let alone street-to-street. They want to know EXACTLY where you are.
There are two ways to look at hardware: 1. Pieces that you put together to make a computer 2. Pieces that you design to make a computer
The former requires at most a two-year degree, and then only if you pad it with English and History and other crap. Realistically, if you want to do computer hardware at this level, get a one-year vocational certificate. Somehow I doubt that this is what you're looking for.
The other aspect of hardware is its design and creation. At this point you're looking at something more like electrical engineering than computer science. Designing an input buffer optimizer for the next generation of 128-bit microcontrollers (I made that up...) does not require that you understand the difference betweena bubble sort and a binary tree. Granted, programmers will be the primary users of your creation, so you'd need to know a bit of what they know, but you wouldn't need to be a computer scientist.
You seem to have a bit of economic thinking behind your question, so I'll point this out: there are far more people writing software for Intel chips than there are designers of Intel chips. I think the same could be said of almost any general purpose CPU.
You make a good point. Now that the university is under no legal compulsion to provide information on these students' identities, I hope the universities are destroying any log files that might identify the students.
If you believe the EULA, they ARE renting their software. They only demand one rent payment, and the agreement lasts indefinitely. In Microsoft's opinion, they aren't selling you a copy; they are providing you with permission to use a copy. There is an unsubtle legal difference between ownership and usage, and the best real-property example I can think of is the difference between owning a house and renting a house.
I suppose a closer (but unrealistic) analogy would be paying a builder $100,000 for a house with the provision that if he doesn't like what you do with the house, he will take ownership of the house and evict you.
I'm not. I'm replying to what you wrote. Sorry, but I didn't take my mind-reading pills this morning.
You said AOL checked some technical stuff and checked to see that you were legit; I took that to mean "Only sending SPAM from big corporations" - SPAM from big corps is considered legitimate by big corps like AOL/TW. Now you've piqued my interest.
Did AOL do any kind of checks to determine that the people you were emailing WANTED to receive your emails? I believe you when you say it was all opt-in, but I'd demand a higher level of proof than "I said so" if I were to let you send several million emails through my servers. Did AOL?
Disney is, at its core, a corporation. Its only mandate and its only desire is to earn money. If the management of Disney believed that they could make more money by burning every foot of film ever made by the company, they would.
Sure. Whatever helps you sleep at night. The rest of us will continue to regard as spam the endless emails we get from companies that we did business with once. If I don't EXPLICITLY ASK FOR IT (opt in, not opt out) and it's a MAILING LIST and it's from a BUSINESS and, it's SPAM. If AOL lets you send it, then by any common-sense measure, they DO NOT have their act together.
It sounds to me like what they're doing is insuring that your technical configuration is correct; I see no indication that they verify that there is some basis for your belief that the recipients of your SPAM actually want it.
Please take your Bank of America, General Motors, and McDonald's SPAM somewhere else. I didn't ask for it, and I don't want it.
An author's control is limited to when a work can be copied
Nope. Bill Gates doesn't SELL you a copy of Windows - he LICENSES it. It's the difference between your right to smash all the walls in a house you own , and your utter lack of rights to smash all the walls in a house you rent.
Maybe if you believed that EULAs were legally binding contracts Actually, I don't, and I advise people to behave as if they bought a copy. You raise a valid point. I will counter that Gates is rich enough to effetively buy a decision in his favor. He is also powerful enough to force people to make the change. I posted this argument elsewhere in this thread, but it would boil down to refusing to supply security patches to people who didn't accept his modified EULA, and publicizing the multitudinous security flaws MS would find in the "old" versions of Windows. Six months of that would see all Windows boxes rooted unless they paid their annual Microsoft tax.
I haven't installed XP, so I haven't read the EULA; I am indeed going on older memories.
However, I followed your link and found this:
6. TERMINATION. Without prejudice to any other rights, Microsoft may cancel this EULA if you do not abide by the terms and conditions of this EULA, in which case you must destroy all copies of the Product and all of its component parts.
Are you of the opinion that you, the user, get to decide if you've abided by the terms and conditions of the EULA? Or do you think Microsoft makes that determination? If you fight it, of course, a court gets to make the determination. But note this text in section 1: You may permit a maximum of ten (10) computers or other electronic devices (each a "Device") to connect to the Workstation Computer... Have you connected your workstation to the internet? Then a sufficiently strict reading of that clause means you've violated the EULA. Of course, Microsoft has no intention of enforcing it like that, which is why they put it in the EULA.
Am I getting a bit paranoid at this point? Of course. My point is simply that the terms of the EULA give ALL the power to the owner of the copyright, and NONE to you. You can use the product for as long as Bill Gates makes money at it.
More pragmatically, what Bill would probably do rather than yanking everyone's license is to move to an annual licensing fee and to refuse to provide security patches to the old perpetual licenses. (He can do this; note section 11 - 90 days after you purchase the product, you have NO warranty (ie quality) rights at all). After denying security patches to you, he sets a couple hundred programmers to finding security flaws and releasing patches for the ANNUAL licensees, followed a few days later with detailed instructions for exploiting the flaws. In essence, he can, at will, render the product useless unless you give him more $$$.
Clinton's DID answer "no." Under oath, and under penalty of perjury, he was asked "Are you having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." He answered "No." His ridiculous justification came later, when the truth about that relationship came out, and he was under the threat of perjury; he implied that what he meant was "No, I am not at this very instant engaged in sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." This of course is absurd; this was NOT the meaning of the question, and he knew it. He chose to provide an incorrect answer to the question. An imperfect analogy would be if I asked "What is 2+3?" and he answered "4" (meaning, of course, that 2+2=4). An exact analogy would have been if they had asked "Are you President of the United States?" and he answered "No" meaning that he was not, at that very instant, presiding over the United States (Instead, he was acting as a private citizen, answering some rather stupid questions about a personal relationship).
Clinton's mistake was in NOT saying, "I will answer to no judge except the Chief Justice of the United States at such a time as the House of Representatives passes a bill of impeachment!" Until he lied under oath, there was really no basis for impeachment.
And to any who would say that his personal relationship was unimportant, permit me to point out that people who lie obviously about unimportant things are either compulsive or pathological liars. If it was unimportant, there was no need to lie; if it was important, it was imperative that he not lie. There is simply no excuse for a sitting president to lie. Withholding information and refusing to answer, sure. Lying, never.
No, he was quite clear, in exactly the same sense as Clinton was (Clinton is the man who said "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is.") Nixon was playing with semantics. The Congress makes the law, the President enforces it. Only the President can choose to enforce the law, and if he chooses not to enforce a law, then violating that law is not illegal. I am not making the argument very well, but it is a sound argument. As long as you throw common sense out the window. Of course, in the legal profession, they manage to do that fourteen times before eating breakfast, so who knows? It's possible that Nixon's legal theory would have held up in court.
Slashdot Mirror
Go back and read the second paragraph of my post. In particular, read the last sentence. And in case you still don't get it, I'll spell it out for you:
STATEMENTS ABOUT GROUPS CANNOT BE REFUTED BY STATEMENTS ABOUT INDIVIDUALS.
You know many Democrats. Do you know at least 1500 of them? Because if you don't, you can't base ANY valid statement about the beliefs of the group based on your acquaintances. Frankly, if you don't know why I say "1500", you aren't qualified to say ANYTHING about the opinions of large groups, unless you are quoting someone else's statistical study.
Now, if you'd like to quote a statistical study to prove me wrong, feel free to do so.
Its only natural that they would move people on to an open browser.
Except that they could have done this anytime in the past three years or so. While I'm sure that the freeness of the browser is a plus, I suspect that they taken this step for purely pragmatic reasons: lower support costs. Those that disagree are invited to offer a convincing argument that IBM wouldn't switch to a proprietary browser that had significantly lower (read: "zero") support costs than FireFox.
Anecdotal evidence. The typical Texas Democrat supports the death penalty, opposes abortion, and owns guns. In majority Democrat states, such a person could be expected to vote Republican. A Texas Democrat may be a union worker, a trial lawyer, or a historically oppressed racial minority; these are all Democrat constituencies. You are correct that you ARE a democrat, but in other communities, you might find you have more in common with Republicans. By the same token, I would expect the typical Massachusetts Republican to vote Democrat in Texas.
If I may be permitted a tiny flame, I'd suggest that you don't distinguish between statistical statements about groups of people and categorical statements about each member of a group of people. While the latter is fallacious, the former is not. Granted, they are easily confused, and bigots often pretend to say the former when they mean the latter. However, in intelligent discourse, it is important to realize that statistical statements CANNOT be refuted by anecdotes. "The averate 4-year-old can't read" is true, no matter how many gifted four-year-olds you might find.
Frank Herbert has this to say about your experience:
"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? That's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind." - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
Your anecdote is a perfect example of why evil prospers in this world. Great evil prospers because small evils are left unchecked. Never miss an opportunity to force people to confront the fact that what they are doing is evil. Never miss an opportunity to force evildoers to face the consequences of their actions. Failure to do so is not merely inaction; it is encouragement of evil. In your case, you permitted your boss to profit by exactly the amount that he withheld from you.
Yeah, yeah, I'm taking it too seriously and stomping all over your largely reasonable advice. Call it an effect of what's happened in my life and my foul mood today. But at least think about what I said.
It's a little frustrating to realize, but I guess the cost of maintaining an intelligent, civilized society is a constant battle against ignorance.
Let me paraphrase: It's a little frustrating to realize, but I guess the cost of maintaining an free society is a constant battle against outside interference.
Are you a registered voter in the state of Kansas? NO? Then any action you take to influence the politics of the state of Kansas is an attempt to subvert democracy.
I don't know about you, but I value my freedom more than I value knowledge. By analogy, I value a $100 bill more than a $50 bill. Both are necessary to buy the $150 stereo, but the $100 bill is more important to the purchase. The Germans under Hitler arguably had a better science than the Americans. Their vehicles and weapons were better engineered. They build ballistic missiles, for crying out loud. Many of the most important scientists on the Manhattan project came from Germany. And why did they leave? They thought it more important to live in a free society than a well-educated one.
So let the Kansans perform their little experiment. Is it stupid? Yes. Will it hurt them? Almost certainly. Is interfering worse than enforcing education? I believe so.
A parting shot: the argument that "We know more" was used extensively during the Age of Exploration to justify the political suppression of non-European peoples. What makes you different?If you're not a voter, and you're not subpoenaed by the elected representatives of the voters, then you have no business interfering.
(As for the rest of your post...I like your analysis of the differing views of facts and theory. Food for thought - most interesting thing I've read here all week.)
Many slashdotters can't tell you what the dx is in the integral for. In other words, they know the WHAT and the HOW but not the WHY.
Wavelet transforms? For video enhancement? Pft. IFS all the way. Fractals, baby, fractals.
Nope. 64.8% is the upper limit, but I wouldn't expect such a figure to be off by more than 10%, though. From the information you present, though, all we know for certaion is that the literacy rate is greater than 0% and less than 64.8%.
From where I sit, it takes 6-24 months to clear. Until you clear you're practically useless.
While common or "garden" mercury is quite familiar to element watchers, a far more rewarding sight is the rare "mercury of paradise." Element watchers are dying in droves to see this incredible manifestation of mercury.
Apple Records didn't have a trademark dispute. They had a contract dispute. Apple had contractual obligated themselves (ie they had promised) not to ever enter the music business.
Then they entered the music business.
There was no question of trademark involved; it was all about the contract.
it is odd for them to wait until now to try and halt such a heralded product.
Not odd at all, for a few reasons. Only upper management (let's call them the CxOs) would have the corporate clout to initiate a lawsuit against a big-name corp like Apple. Consider the following hypothetical scenarios:
1. Prior Apple products have had internal code names that were used in a semi-public way. (The Sagan/BHA saga comes to mind.) The CxOs thought Tiger was just such a code name, and, being clueless as only management can be, didn't realize until this late that it was not the case.
2. The CxOs, being clueless as only management can be, hadn't heard of Apple's "Tiger" until now.
3. The CxOs, realizing that this was an open-and-shut case, figured they'd give Apple enough rope to hang themselves. They're all expert blackmailers - sorry, "negotiators" - and know that Apple is now facing a time crunch. Apple has a hard deadline and must settle on Tiger Direct's terms.
Don't know about you, but #3 strikes me as really plausible. I don't know if that makes me cynical or just experienced, but I don't see Tiger's behavior as odd, in the sense of "statistically unusual".
Some have suggested that having a "good enough" 911 service for VOIP is acceptable. In other words, if 95% of VOIP users are actually just using it as a cheap local phone replacement, then it's OK to have the other 5% die because the paramedics can't find them. I disagree with this line of thinking. This kind of emergency service needs to be either 100% guaranteed, or advertised as not available at all.
I would prefer to see legislation that demanded truth in advertising. Customers should be required to sign a release that says (in a 24-point font):
"911 DON'T WORK ON MY NEW PHONE. I CAN'T CALL THE COPS ON MY NEW PHONE. I CAN'T CALL AN AMBULANCE ON MY NEW PHONE. I CAN'T CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT ON MY NEW PHONE."
If people have been hurt because VOIP providers didn't GUARANTEE that their customers didn't understand that the new technology could put them at risk in an emergency, then I'd say hang the CxOs from the nearest telephone pole as a warning to the rest. If customers knew EXACTLY what they were getting, then the government is interfering with the private business of consenting adults.
When you call 911 the "regular way", you don't get your local coffee shop's 911 service
You are pedantically correct but completely wrong within the framework of this discussion.
When you call 911 from the local coffee shop, the 911 operator knows you are at the local coffee shop. She may even know where in the building the extension you're on is located. The point is not what 911 call center answers your phone; the point is that the operator sees on screen the exact location of the phone you're calling from. That simply isn't possible for a mobile user of VOIP.
If the ambulance goes to the wrong address, you're still dead. If you're passed out on the floor in the building next to where the paramedics are knocking down the door, you're going to die. If you aren't where they expect you, they aren't going door-to-door to find you, let alone street-to-street. They want to know EXACTLY where you are.
That cannot be guaranteed with VOIP.
There are two ways to look at hardware:
1. Pieces that you put together to make a computer
2. Pieces that you design to make a computer
The former requires at most a two-year degree, and then only if you pad it with English and History and other crap. Realistically, if you want to do computer hardware at this level, get a one-year vocational certificate. Somehow I doubt that this is what you're looking for.
The other aspect of hardware is its design and creation. At this point you're looking at something more like electrical engineering than computer science. Designing an input buffer optimizer for the next generation of 128-bit microcontrollers (I made that up...) does not require that you understand the difference betweena bubble sort and a binary tree. Granted, programmers will be the primary users of your creation, so you'd need to know a bit of what they know, but you wouldn't need to be a computer scientist.
You seem to have a bit of economic thinking behind your question, so I'll point this out: there are far more people writing software for Intel chips than there are designers of Intel chips. I think the same could be said of almost any general purpose CPU.
You make a good point. Now that the university is under no legal compulsion to provide information on these students' identities, I hope the universities are destroying any log files that might identify the students.
we don't need to spread FUD
True. Well put.
If you believe the EULA, they ARE renting their software. They only demand one rent payment, and the agreement lasts indefinitely. In Microsoft's opinion, they aren't selling you a copy; they are providing you with permission to use a copy. There is an unsubtle legal difference between ownership and usage, and the best real-property example I can think of is the difference between owning a house and renting a house.
I suppose a closer (but unrealistic) analogy would be paying a builder $100,000 for a house with the provision that if he doesn't like what you do with the house, he will take ownership of the house and evict you.
I'm not. I'm replying to what you wrote. Sorry, but I didn't take my mind-reading pills this morning.
You said AOL checked some technical stuff and checked to see that you were legit; I took that to mean "Only sending SPAM from big corporations" - SPAM from big corps is considered legitimate by big corps like AOL/TW. Now you've piqued my interest.
Did AOL do any kind of checks to determine that the people you were emailing WANTED to receive your emails? I believe you when you say it was all opt-in, but I'd demand a higher level of proof than "I said so" if I were to let you send several million emails through my servers. Did AOL?
Disney is, at its core, a corporation. Its only mandate and its only desire is to earn money. If the management of Disney believed that they could make more money by burning every foot of film ever made by the company, they would.
Once you understand this, we can talk.
not spam, just company announcements and such
Sure. Whatever helps you sleep at night. The rest of us will continue to regard as spam the endless emails we get from companies that we did business with once. If I don't EXPLICITLY ASK FOR IT (opt in, not opt out) and it's a MAILING LIST and it's from a BUSINESS and, it's SPAM. If AOL lets you send it, then by any common-sense measure, they DO NOT have their act together.
It sounds to me like what they're doing is insuring that your technical configuration is correct; I see no indication that they verify that there is some basis for your belief that the recipients of your SPAM actually want it.
Please take your Bank of America, General Motors, and McDonald's SPAM somewhere else. I didn't ask for it, and I don't want it.
By your reasoning, every cubic millimeter of every solid object is a hole that just happens to be filled.
An author's control is limited to when a work can be copied
Nope. Bill Gates doesn't SELL you a copy of Windows - he LICENSES it. It's the difference between your right to smash all the walls in a house you own , and your utter lack of rights to smash all the walls in a house you rent.
Maybe if you believed that EULAs were legally binding contracts
Actually, I don't, and I advise people to behave as if they bought a copy. You raise a valid point. I will counter that Gates is rich enough to effetively buy a decision in his favor. He is also powerful enough to force people to make the change. I posted this argument elsewhere in this thread, but it would boil down to refusing to supply security patches to people who didn't accept his modified EULA, and publicizing the multitudinous security flaws MS would find in the "old" versions of Windows. Six months of that would see all Windows boxes rooted unless they paid their annual Microsoft tax.
I haven't installed XP, so I haven't read the EULA; I am indeed going on older memories.
However, I followed your link and found this:
6. TERMINATION. Without prejudice to any other rights, Microsoft may cancel this EULA if you do not abide by the terms and conditions of this EULA, in which case you must destroy all copies of the Product and all of its component parts.
Are you of the opinion that you, the user, get to decide if you've abided by the terms and conditions of the EULA? Or do you think Microsoft makes that determination? If you fight it, of course, a court gets to make the determination. But note this text in section 1:
You may permit a maximum of ten (10) computers or other electronic devices (each a "Device") to connect to the Workstation Computer...
Have you connected your workstation to the internet? Then a sufficiently strict reading of that clause means you've violated the EULA. Of course, Microsoft has no intention of enforcing it like that, which is why they put it in the EULA.
Am I getting a bit paranoid at this point? Of course. My point is simply that the terms of the EULA give ALL the power to the owner of the copyright, and NONE to you. You can use the product for as long as Bill Gates makes money at it.
More pragmatically, what Bill would probably do rather than yanking everyone's license is to move to an annual licensing fee and to refuse to provide security patches to the old perpetual licenses. (He can do this; note section 11 - 90 days after you purchase the product, you have NO warranty (ie quality) rights at all). After denying security patches to you, he sets a couple hundred programmers to finding security flaws and releasing patches for the ANNUAL licensees, followed a few days later with detailed instructions for exploiting the flaws. In essence, he can, at will, render the product useless unless you give him more $$$.
Clinton's DID answer "no." Under oath, and under penalty of perjury, he was asked "Are you having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." He answered "No." His ridiculous justification came later, when the truth about that relationship came out, and he was under the threat of perjury; he implied that what he meant was "No, I am not at this very instant engaged in sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." This of course is absurd; this was NOT the meaning of the question, and he knew it. He chose to provide an incorrect answer to the question. An imperfect analogy would be if I asked "What is 2+3?" and he answered "4" (meaning, of course, that 2+2=4). An exact analogy would have been if they had asked "Are you President of the United States?" and he answered "No" meaning that he was not, at that very instant, presiding over the United States (Instead, he was acting as a private citizen, answering some rather stupid questions about a personal relationship).
Clinton's mistake was in NOT saying, "I will answer to no judge except the Chief Justice of the United States at such a time as the House of Representatives passes a bill of impeachment!" Until he lied under oath, there was really no basis for impeachment.
And to any who would say that his personal relationship was unimportant, permit me to point out that people who lie obviously about unimportant things are either compulsive or pathological liars. If it was unimportant, there was no need to lie; if it was important, it was imperative that he not lie. There is simply no excuse for a sitting president to lie. Withholding information and refusing to answer, sure. Lying, never.
No, he was quite clear, in exactly the same sense as Clinton was (Clinton is the man who said "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is.") Nixon was playing with semantics. The Congress makes the law, the President enforces it. Only the President can choose to enforce the law, and if he chooses not to enforce a law, then violating that law is not illegal. I am not making the argument very well, but it is a sound argument. As long as you throw common sense out the window. Of course, in the legal profession, they manage to do that fourteen times before eating breakfast, so who knows? It's possible that Nixon's legal theory would have held up in court.