So the entire space program of the 1960's resulted in no significant technological advances that have found their way down to the consumer and benefitted them?
Toho has no trademark on 'Zilla, because the use of that term for just about everything has become so common in the language that it no longer deserves trademark protection.
Just as Johnson & Johnson lost its grip on "Band-Aid" which is now a synonym for bandage.
The use of "'zillas" goes back many years and a trademark owner is required to agressively and proactively defend its trademark from dilution.
"'Zilla" is diluted, there's a pretty strong argument for that. And that defeats a trademark.
In other words, even when analyzing only a 200 year period (assuming there isn't any current rapid worldwide climate change), the statistics can actually be quite strong.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. You may or may not be agreeing with this: We know that over long periods of time the climate changes dramatically, thus we expect over a contiguous section of 200 years there should be some sort of trend. Some people see a trend and shout that the sky is falling.
As with the polls that are done, if you poll 1000 random individuals across the country, the statistics work out something like you have an 80% chance of being within 10% of the true answer. There's a couple percent chance that their answer is significantly off because by chance they polled a cluster.
The statistics for acoustic neuroma are supposed to be 1 in 100,000. I beat the odds pretty dramatically by knowing 2 of these people!
Uh, you did read the article yesterday about Conspiracies and Probabilities right? You know the part about clusters happening naturally but people wanting to attribute causal affects to them?
Dell could ship those machines with FreeDOS if they wanted... Slap it on a CD - don't have to install it on the harddrive, and increase the cost of the machine to the end user by $1.
The only rub is that Dell doesn't want to provide support for that operating systems. With a NO-OS machine, it is implicit that you get no OS support. The great hordes of idiots out there would buy a "no OS support" machine with FreeDOS then call up Dell asking where windows was.
That's the whole point of copyright laws, the exclusive right to make a copy of something.
No, The whole point of copyright laws is the exclusive right to make a copy of something for commercial purposes. The Supreme Court and case law has carved out that we may make copies for our own personal use, or archival purposes.
If you are streaming data I/O, then the primitive objects would be sent as their 8/16/32/64 bit primitive representations.
Primitive objects do not have to take up a lot more memory than primitive types. I could envision an implementation that kept primitives small until you tried to inherit from them, or wait/notify on them (something the author of the article wanted, but I think just having finals would be adequate).
The actual memory required for an Object doesn't have to be that large. And what the author of the article really seemed to want was the ability to add a primitive to a collection without having to write 8 add() methods for each primitive or wrapping the primitive every single time. Having the compiler transparently do it all would be sweet.
When is 0x80 + 0x01 not 0x81? Having to manually compensate for two's complement representation gave me a big headache.
Here's an easy way to remember it:
0x80 + 0x01 is always 0x81.
In non two's complement, it's obvious: 128 + 1 = 129 = 0x81.
In two's complement: -128 + 1 = -127 = 0x81
The reason two's complement math is used is because the summation circuit for signed and unsigned values is the same. The difference circuit is only slightly different from the summation circuit - it adds a unary negation in front of the addition. But subtraction for signed or unsigned numbers is the still the same circuit.
I'm pretty sure the average citizen of the U.S. is doing its part to reach the increased mass goal. It's time we started feeding McDonalds, Taco Bell and KFC to all the other nations!
Okay fine, the posts saying "it's G not g" aren't actually correct, it's g not G. In any case...
The value for little g - "standard acceleration of gravity" is fixed. 1g does not depend on where on earth you are - or how far from earth you are. The value is always the same because it was chosen for convenience. Look it up. Some scientists got together and said "Hey, let's define this value as being 1g - it mostly works most of the time".
Okay, let's get it straight here... The accepted value for "standard acceleration of gravity" is 9.80665 m/s^2 - exactly. There's no "plus or minus" or "uncertainty".
That's it. No magic. 1G *always* accelerates mass at 9.81 m/s^2 (rounded). If the acceleration is something else, whatever is being accelerated isn't experiencing a net force of 1G.
The value is pinned. It isn't variable over the earth's surface in accordance to the proximity to more dense matter in the earth. Yes its value was chosen to be pretty much the force you feel on the surface of the earth.
Yes, and you get exactly the service they claim: A nice copy of what is being broadcast over the air without an antenna. In some limited instances local cable companies can purchase the option to insert local commercials in slots already reserved for commercials by the broadcaster.
What AOL is doing would be analogous to your cable tv provider adding in commercials on top of those already inserted by the broadcaster.
I've been plagued by this problem as well. I have a Belkin Omni 4 port KVM that gets almost no use because the mouse problems are so severe. I don't know if our problems are identical, but:
I only have the mouse problems with optical mice. I haven't tested all optical mice, but all mine are those microsoft intellimouse jobs that are really USB mice with a USB->PS/2 converter. Every single one of them has issues with the KVM switch.
If I use an old straight PS/2 intellimouse with a ball, I have no problems what so ever.
Also, I can get the mouse back in Linux, but you may not like the method: If I do a ctrl-alt-backspace (the X windows reset), the mouse will come back but everything that was open will close (in fact I'll have to re-login).
This problem really displayed how weak KDE/Gnome was with non-mouse support (using keyboard only). At least back in 2.0. I ultimately gave up and installed Exceed on a windows machine. Now the KVM gets no use.
I like how I never said "religious freedom", yet you quote it and refer to it three times.
I said freedom of *religious expression*. You might be suprised to find that most non-catholics do not find this dangerously blasphemous. Maybe the people who put it up were doing so as a way to practice their religious belief that Mary should not be an exception to the 2nd commandment.
And in case you are wondering... art has a long history of being composed of things which shock and offend... but is still art. It has also taught us that tolerance is important since offense is so very subjective a thing.
Blessed Mother by whose opinion? Oh, that's right, by the opinion of your religion. What if other religions disagree? Oop, how dare they consider freedom of religious expression! There is only One True Church, right?
one does not have the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater,
No, but you can write about yelling fire in a crowded theater all you want.
and you can make the case that this is exactly what the Web site was doing, from a theological point of view.
How does this put a group of people in a confined space in immediate peril of life and limb?
Damned AC's. I should know better than to reply to them.
Unfortunately the truth is to fix Linux for the desktop, you need to fork the kernel.
What makes Linux inappropriate for the desktop is its lack of real time features, its monolithic design, its unix everything-is-a-filesystem-object architecture, it's hostility towards proprietary hardware drivers, etc.. All good things or non-issues for Servers. All terrible for a desktop user. (hint: Desktop users don't want to recompile their kernel... *EVER* - and they don't want to wait for their OS Vendor to come out with a complete set of up to date kernels with drivers)
Getting rid of X is a good start. Getting rid of lpd/cups is another good start. Major surgery on the kernel is also required.
This article is about to roll off the front page, so I doubt anybody will read this, but I'll post it anyway.
I believe OBOS will fail, and it will be a shame. But it will fail because it is a large project managed like a commercial project, and people just aren't jumping on board.
When I gave up on Linux and decided it didn't have what it took to be a desktop OS, I went looking for something else to contribute my time to. OBOS seemed like the thing. An OS whose primary thrust was the desktop, not as a server!
However I quickly found that all the things that Linux did right in the early days (and still doing right today), OBOS is *not* doing. Take a look at their join us page. It looks and feels as though they are filtering applicants. It isn't like Linux where the source code is out there, easy to get, easy to hack, easy to submit a patch to the other developers and eventually have your fixes make it into the code. You don't come out of nowhere and submit something to OBOS, you Join up and hope they put you on to "that team".
Of course this is necessary because all these team members have CVS access and can create a nightmare for everybody else. If it was just anybody posting patches to a mailing list the problem would not exist.
Thus, sadly, OBOS is going to fail because the OBOS Powers That Be don't understand what Linux did right. As a result, nobody wants to go through the "commitment" of "joining" - especially now that they're talking about removing people who aren't contributing... Now joining carries an obligation... What if I just want to play around and hack a little and ask others to try my changes?
My right to protect my property DOES supercede your personal privacy rights WHEN YOU STEAL FROM ME! WTF is wrong with you?
Besides, if they had any brains at all, they would have announced they were going to search bags on the way out, which they have a perfect right to do, since someone was STEALING.
You're rather clueless, are you a bit young maybe? Let me show you why:
Say I'm walking out of an electronics store with a backpack. The manager says "Hey, wait a minute! You might be stealing something, I want to search your backpack.", can he compel me to surrender your backpack for searching?
Answer: NO, unless an employee has seen me complete the "5 tests" for shoplifting. He can ask me to voluntarily submit it for searching. (Many electronics stores do this with items you just bought, they check the receipt at the door against what is in your bag. You *voluntarily* submit to this. Once paid for, the receipt, the bag, and the items in it are your personal property.)
Even if there is a big sign that says 'We reserve the right to search backpacks on people leaving here' he *still* cannot do so.
Why?
Because his right to protect the store's personal property does not supercede your right to personal privacy. The store cannot reserve a right it does not have.
The car company has every right to do what they did, because of the contract period.
Again, you cannot sign away your rights. Your black-and-white view of what makes a contract legally binding departs from reality. Go ahead, start up a company, hire a legal team to write a slimy contract that confuses the lay person and attempt to use it to fine/over charge them. If you pay your legal team well, they should inform you a court would strike it as unenforceable in a heartbeat.
Your ability to read and not understand what was written is phenomenal. I said the building attracted law firms. Any bathrooms inside an office was maintained by the tenant. It was the building bathrooms that were well kept and well stocked by the building management.
So if a police officer pulls you over and wants to look in your trunk, can he? No, He can't (unless you consent or he hears something from the trunk, or a sniffer dog smells something). What if the car is not yours - say if the car is leased, can the cop call the dealer and ask their permission? Can the cop call the rental place and get permission? Possession and ownership are different things. In all those cases, only by obtaining reasonable cause or your permission can the trunk be searched. Because there is reasonable expectation of privacy.
I disagree with your perception of court rulings, you'll have to come up with citations, because I think you're bluffing.
The rental agency does not negotiate with you what stores you will go to or what hotels you will stay in. Those matters are private and not appropriate to be collected by them.
My wife used to work for the company managing a high-class commercial office building. The type of building that attracts tenants like law firms that have a need to be in a fancy well maintained building in order to attract high paying clientele. In the bathrooms the management provided various nice toiletries for tenants and their customers or clients. In the women's bathrooms they provided tampons in nice hardwood cigar boxes. The problem was someone kept stealing the expensive cigar-turned-tampon box. What rights did the property owners (who ultimately paid for the box and its replacements) then have to protect their property rights and monitor the cigar box in the bathroom to see who was taking them?
Answer: NONE
Your right to protect your property from mis-use does not supercede the rights to personal privacy in an area where one should expect privacy.
And in case you're wondering, nobody had the right to steal those boxes.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
Read that, and then lets proceed from there.
*sigh* Only applies to and limits the Government.
First off, in any decent court of law, this evidence would be inadmissable for a few good reasons.
In a criminal action you might be correct. Unless it provides some clear exculpatory circumstantial evidence, it would be thrown out. In a civil action, you are almost certainly wrong. The bar is much lower for civil cases. None of this "reasonable doubt" stuff. And unless your divorce is really messy it's just a civil action.
The larger issue is whether, as a renter of property, rights of privacy come attached to rental agrement. I contend clearly not. The rights of property holders supercedes the transfer of privacy rights to renters.
So the owner of an apartment/duplex/house can enter the premises at any time to make sure it is being well kept, right? I mean if I want to make sure my tenants aren't cooking meth at 3 in the morning, I can walk in and check, right? The law varies from state to state, but most of them require at least 24 hours notice, and the inspection must take place during reasonable hours (meaning not 3am). Therefore I would say the law disagrees with you.
Again, you *really* do not sound libertarian. You clearly give preference to the priveleged minority to exercise invasive actions against the rest.
I would point you to the fact that you cannot require someone as a condition of using your bathroom to sign an agreement allowing you to monitor their use of the bathroom with video equipment. It's your bathroom, right? You should be able to set the rules, right? Wrong. The closest you come to that is pay them (consideration) in exchange for your monitoring.
There are a whole series of things the courts have decided should offer a reasonable expectation of privacy. The bathroom is one. Another is a phone call to an outside party on your employer's telephone. Look back to the fervor created when cities wanted to install "photo radar" so they could just mail you tickets instead of taking up valuable police officer time - do really think there isn't an argument that a car should offer some degree of reasonable expectation of privacy?
Actually you need to reassess your ideology, because you do not come across as a proponent of civil liberty. You seem to believe that hiding things in contracts where a lay person who does not scrutinize it with the skill of an experienced lawyer is okay. You sound like someone who is pro-big corporations squeezing the little guy.
Businesses are held to a higher standard because it is known they can afford a legal team to draft and analyze a contract that hides details of abusive acts they intend to perform in order to squeeze more money out of a customer. If budget did not print in a large type face at the top of the rental agreement "We have a tracking device on the car that monitors where you are at all times and reports back to us and if you travel outside allowed boundaries you will be fined $1 for every mile you traveled inside or outside of those boundaries" then Budget is going to be in an uncomfortable spot.
They charge $1 for every mile traveled if you take one step out of bounds? Now why would they do that? Maybe because they knew if they exercise that penalty option they will permanently lose a customer so it is important to get as much money as possible from them at that time. How many people will spend $7,500 on budget rental cars during their lifetime?
That not withstanding, if they keep a record of where you've been, they have violated your *RIGHT* to privacy. If they have you sign away that *RIGHT* without some *CONSIDERATION* then that portion of the contract is probably going to be voided (I don't think "You get to drive our car which you are paying us for anyway" is going to hold up as consideration for signing away your right to privacy). Can an employer who is unhappy with people stealing stuff out of the executive washroom have you sign away your right to privacy in that bathroom? Here's a hint: NO THEY CAN'T. What if you're going through a messy divorce and your spouse's lawyer files a discovery subpoena for the logs of where you went with your rental car looking to create evidence suggestive of having an affair? Seems like quite an invasion of privacy now, doesn't it?
In a Civil suit (which is what most of those suits are), Budget is in an uncomfortable position already. They are going to have to convince a jury that hiding the details of what they were doing doesn't represent an egregious abuse of their ability to hire a legal team to write such contracts.
There are some things you just can't sign away. Adjust your political leanings accordingly.
Okay, the information is VERY spartan so I'm mostly reading between the lines and making a guess here...
Microsoft demanded that the downloads be stopped because the binary was created using Microsoft's Xbox Dev Kit (XDK). Either something distributed in the binary, or the license restrictions on the Dev Kit forbid distributing the binary.
The source is still legally obtainable. The binary is probably available illegally through LimeWire/Kazaa/IRC.
Slashdot Mirror
So the entire space program of the 1960's resulted in no significant technological advances that have found their way down to the consumer and benefitted them?
Are you *sure* ?
I disagree... I think it would be easy to argue:
Toho has no trademark on 'Zilla, because the use of that term for just about everything has become so common in the language that it no longer deserves trademark protection.
Just as Johnson & Johnson lost its grip on "Band-Aid" which is now a synonym for bandage.
The use of "'zillas" goes back many years and a trademark owner is required to agressively and proactively defend its trademark from dilution.
"'Zilla" is diluted, there's a pretty strong argument for that. And that defeats a trademark.
In other words, even when analyzing only a 200 year period (assuming there isn't any current rapid worldwide climate change), the statistics can actually be quite strong.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. You may or may not be agreeing with this: We know that over long periods of time the climate changes dramatically, thus we expect over a contiguous section of 200 years there should be some sort of trend. Some people see a trend and shout that the sky is falling.
As with the polls that are done, if you poll 1000 random individuals across the country, the statistics work out something like you have an 80% chance of being within 10% of the true answer. There's a couple percent chance that their answer is significantly off because by chance they polled a cluster.
The statistics for acoustic neuroma are supposed to be 1 in 100,000. I beat the odds pretty dramatically by knowing 2 of these people!
Uh, you did read the article yesterday about Conspiracies and Probabilities right? You know the part about clusters happening naturally but people wanting to attribute causal affects to them?
Dell could ship those machines with FreeDOS if they wanted... Slap it on a CD - don't have to install it on the harddrive, and increase the cost of the machine to the end user by $1.
The only rub is that Dell doesn't want to provide support for that operating systems. With a NO-OS machine, it is implicit that you get no OS support. The great hordes of idiots out there would buy a "no OS support" machine with FreeDOS then call up Dell asking where windows was.
That's the whole point of copyright laws, the exclusive right to make a copy of something.
No, The whole point of copyright laws is the exclusive right to make a copy of something for commercial purposes. The Supreme Court and case law has carved out that we may make copies for our own personal use, or archival purposes.
I'm not sure I get your argument...
If you are streaming data I/O, then the primitive objects would be sent as their 8/16/32/64 bit primitive representations.
Primitive objects do not have to take up a lot more memory than primitive types. I could envision an implementation that kept primitives small until you tried to inherit from them, or wait/notify on them (something the author of the article wanted, but I think just having finals would be adequate).
The actual memory required for an Object doesn't have to be that large. And what the author of the article really seemed to want was the ability to add a primitive to a collection without having to write 8 add() methods for each primitive or wrapping the primitive every single time. Having the compiler transparently do it all would be sweet.
When is 0x80 + 0x01 not 0x81? Having to manually compensate for two's complement representation gave me a big headache.
Here's an easy way to remember it:
0x80 + 0x01 is always 0x81.
In non two's complement, it's obvious: 128 + 1 = 129 = 0x81.
In two's complement: -128 + 1 = -127 = 0x81
The reason two's complement math is used is because the summation circuit for signed and unsigned values is the same. The difference circuit is only slightly different from the summation circuit - it adds a unary negation in front of the addition. But subtraction for signed or unsigned numbers is the still the same circuit.
I'm pretty sure the average citizen of the U.S. is doing its part to reach the increased mass goal. It's time we started feeding McDonalds, Taco Bell and KFC to all the other nations!
Okay fine, the posts saying "it's G not g" aren't actually correct, it's g not G. In any case...
The value for little g - "standard acceleration of gravity" is fixed. 1g does not depend on where on earth you are - or how far from earth you are. The value is always the same because it was chosen for convenience. Look it up. Some scientists got together and said "Hey, let's define this value as being 1g - it mostly works most of the time".
Okay, let's get it straight here... The accepted value for "standard acceleration of gravity" is 9.80665 m/s^2 - exactly. There's no "plus or minus" or "uncertainty".
That's it. No magic. 1G *always* accelerates mass at 9.81 m/s^2 (rounded). If the acceleration is something else, whatever is being accelerated isn't experiencing a net force of 1G.
The value is pinned. It isn't variable over the earth's surface in accordance to the proximity to more dense matter in the earth. Yes its value was chosen to be pretty much the force you feel on the surface of the earth.
Awww, can't we just adjust the size of the meter so that 1G ends up being 10.0 m/s^2?
Yes, and you get exactly the service they claim: A nice copy of what is being broadcast over the air without an antenna. In some limited instances local cable companies can purchase the option to insert local commercials in slots already reserved for commercials by the broadcaster.
What AOL is doing would be analogous to your cable tv provider adding in commercials on top of those already inserted by the broadcaster.
I've been plagued by this problem as well. I have a Belkin Omni 4 port KVM that gets almost no use because the mouse problems are so severe. I don't know if our problems are identical, but:
I only have the mouse problems with optical mice. I haven't tested all optical mice, but all mine are those microsoft intellimouse jobs that are really USB mice with a USB->PS/2 converter. Every single one of them has issues with the KVM switch.
If I use an old straight PS/2 intellimouse with a ball, I have no problems what so ever.
Also, I can get the mouse back in Linux, but you may not like the method: If I do a ctrl-alt-backspace (the X windows reset), the mouse will come back but everything that was open will close (in fact I'll have to re-login).
This problem really displayed how weak KDE/Gnome was with non-mouse support (using keyboard only). At least back in 2.0. I ultimately gave up and installed Exceed on a windows machine. Now the KVM gets no use.
YMMV, Hope this helps.
I like how I never said "religious freedom", yet you quote it and refer to it three times.
I said freedom of *religious expression*. You might be suprised to find that most non-catholics do not find this dangerously blasphemous. Maybe the people who put it up were doing so as a way to practice their religious belief that Mary should not be an exception to the 2nd commandment.
And in case you are wondering... art has a long history of being composed of things which shock and offend... but is still art. It has also taught us that tolerance is important since offense is so very subjective a thing.
hatespeech against the Blessed Mother
Blessed Mother by whose opinion? Oh, that's right, by the opinion of your religion. What if other religions disagree? Oop, how dare they consider freedom of religious expression! There is only One True Church, right?
one does not have the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater,
No, but you can write about yelling fire in a crowded theater all you want.
and you can make the case that this is exactly what the Web site was doing, from a theological point of view.
How does this put a group of people in a confined space in immediate peril of life and limb?
Damned AC's. I should know better than to reply to them.
Unfortunately the truth is to fix Linux for the desktop, you need to fork the kernel.
What makes Linux inappropriate for the desktop is its lack of real time features, its monolithic design, its unix everything-is-a-filesystem-object architecture, it's hostility towards proprietary hardware drivers, etc.. All good things or non-issues for Servers. All terrible for a desktop user. (hint: Desktop users don't want to recompile their kernel... *EVER* - and they don't want to wait for their OS Vendor to come out with a complete set of up to date kernels with drivers)
Getting rid of X is a good start. Getting rid of lpd/cups is another good start. Major surgery on the kernel is also required.
This article is about to roll off the front page, so I doubt anybody will read this, but I'll post it anyway.
I believe OBOS will fail, and it will be a shame. But it will fail because it is a large project managed like a commercial project, and people just aren't jumping on board.
When I gave up on Linux and decided it didn't have what it took to be a desktop OS, I went looking for something else to contribute my time to. OBOS seemed like the thing. An OS whose primary thrust was the desktop, not as a server!
However I quickly found that all the things that Linux did right in the early days (and still doing right today), OBOS is *not* doing. Take a look at their join us page. It looks and feels as though they are filtering applicants. It isn't like Linux where the source code is out there, easy to get, easy to hack, easy to submit a patch to the other developers and eventually have your fixes make it into the code. You don't come out of nowhere and submit something to OBOS, you Join up and hope they put you on to "that team".
Of course this is necessary because all these team members have CVS access and can create a nightmare for everybody else. If it was just anybody posting patches to a mailing list the problem would not exist.
Thus, sadly, OBOS is going to fail because the OBOS Powers That Be don't understand what Linux did right. As a result, nobody wants to go through the "commitment" of "joining" - especially now that they're talking about removing people who aren't contributing... Now joining carries an obligation... What if I just want to play around and hack a little and ask others to try my changes?
Sorry OpenBeOS... I *really* wanted you to work.
My right to protect my property DOES supercede your personal privacy rights WHEN YOU STEAL FROM ME! WTF is wrong with you?
Besides, if they had any brains at all, they would have announced they were going to search bags on the way out, which they have a perfect right to do, since someone was STEALING.
You're rather clueless, are you a bit young maybe? Let me show you why:
Say I'm walking out of an electronics store with a backpack. The manager says "Hey, wait a minute! You might be stealing something, I want to search your backpack.", can he compel me to surrender your backpack for searching?
Answer: NO, unless an employee has seen me complete the "5 tests" for shoplifting. He can ask me to voluntarily submit it for searching. (Many electronics stores do this with items you just bought, they check the receipt at the door against what is in your bag. You *voluntarily* submit to this. Once paid for, the receipt, the bag, and the items in it are your personal property.)
Even if there is a big sign that says 'We reserve the right to search backpacks on people leaving here' he *still* cannot do so.
Why?
Because his right to protect the store's personal property does not supercede your right to personal privacy. The store cannot reserve a right it does not have.
The car company has every right to do what they did, because of the contract period.
Again, you cannot sign away your rights. Your black-and-white view of what makes a contract legally binding departs from reality. Go ahead, start up a company, hire a legal team to write a slimy contract that confuses the lay person and attempt to use it to fine/over charge them. If you pay your legal team well, they should inform you a court would strike it as unenforceable in a heartbeat.
Your ability to read and not understand what was written is phenomenal. I said the building attracted law firms. Any bathrooms inside an office was maintained by the tenant. It was the building bathrooms that were well kept and well stocked by the building management.
So if a police officer pulls you over and wants to look in your trunk, can he? No, He can't (unless you consent or he hears something from the trunk, or a sniffer dog smells something). What if the car is not yours - say if the car is leased, can the cop call the dealer and ask their permission? Can the cop call the rental place and get permission? Possession and ownership are different things. In all those cases, only by obtaining reasonable cause or your permission can the trunk be searched. Because there is reasonable expectation of privacy.
I disagree with your perception of court rulings, you'll have to come up with citations, because I think you're bluffing.
The rental agency does not negotiate with you what stores you will go to or what hotels you will stay in. Those matters are private and not appropriate to be collected by them.
Let me give you a real life example:
My wife used to work for the company managing a high-class commercial office building. The type of building that attracts tenants like law firms that have a need to be in a fancy well maintained building in order to attract high paying clientele. In the bathrooms the management provided various nice toiletries for tenants and their customers or clients. In the women's bathrooms they provided tampons in nice hardwood cigar boxes. The problem was someone kept stealing the expensive cigar-turned-tampon box. What rights did the property owners (who ultimately paid for the box and its replacements) then have to protect their property rights and monitor the cigar box in the bathroom to see who was taking them?
Answer: NONE
Your right to protect your property from mis-use does not supercede the rights to personal privacy in an area where one should expect privacy.
And in case you're wondering, nobody had the right to steal those boxes.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
Read that, and then lets proceed from there.
*sigh* Only applies to and limits the Government.
First off, in any decent court of law, this evidence would be inadmissable for a few good reasons.
In a criminal action you might be correct. Unless it provides some clear exculpatory circumstantial evidence, it would be thrown out. In a civil action, you are almost certainly wrong. The bar is much lower for civil cases. None of this "reasonable doubt" stuff. And unless your divorce is really messy it's just a civil action.
The larger issue is whether, as a renter of property, rights of privacy come attached to rental agrement. I contend clearly not. The rights of property holders supercedes the transfer of privacy rights to renters.
So the owner of an apartment/duplex/house can enter the premises at any time to make sure it is being well kept, right? I mean if I want to make sure my tenants aren't cooking meth at 3 in the morning, I can walk in and check, right? The law varies from state to state, but most of them require at least 24 hours notice, and the inspection must take place during reasonable hours (meaning not 3am). Therefore I would say the law disagrees with you.
Again, you *really* do not sound libertarian. You clearly give preference to the priveleged minority to exercise invasive actions against the rest.
I would point you to the fact that you cannot require someone as a condition of using your bathroom to sign an agreement allowing you to monitor their use of the bathroom with video equipment. It's your bathroom, right? You should be able to set the rules, right? Wrong. The closest you come to that is pay them (consideration) in exchange for your monitoring.
There are a whole series of things the courts have decided should offer a reasonable expectation of privacy. The bathroom is one. Another is a phone call to an outside party on your employer's telephone. Look back to the fervor created when cities wanted to install "photo radar" so they could just mail you tickets instead of taking up valuable police officer time - do really think there isn't an argument that a car should offer some degree of reasonable expectation of privacy?
Actually you need to reassess your ideology, because you do not come across as a proponent of civil liberty. You seem to believe that hiding things in contracts where a lay person who does not scrutinize it with the skill of an experienced lawyer is okay. You sound like someone who is pro-big corporations squeezing the little guy.
Businesses are held to a higher standard because it is known they can afford a legal team to draft and analyze a contract that hides details of abusive acts they intend to perform in order to squeeze more money out of a customer. If budget did not print in a large type face at the top of the rental agreement "We have a tracking device on the car that monitors where you are at all times and reports back to us and if you travel outside allowed boundaries you will be fined $1 for every mile you traveled inside or outside of those boundaries" then Budget is going to be in an uncomfortable spot.
They charge $1 for every mile traveled if you take one step out of bounds? Now why would they do that? Maybe because they knew if they exercise that penalty option they will permanently lose a customer so it is important to get as much money as possible from them at that time. How many people will spend $7,500 on budget rental cars during their lifetime?
That not withstanding, if they keep a record of where you've been, they have violated your *RIGHT* to privacy. If they have you sign away that *RIGHT* without some *CONSIDERATION* then that portion of the contract is probably going to be voided (I don't think "You get to drive our car which you are paying us for anyway" is going to hold up as consideration for signing away your right to privacy). Can an employer who is unhappy with people stealing stuff out of the executive washroom have you sign away your right to privacy in that bathroom? Here's a hint: NO THEY CAN'T. What if you're going through a messy divorce and your spouse's lawyer files a discovery subpoena for the logs of where you went with your rental car looking to create evidence suggestive of having an affair? Seems like quite an invasion of privacy now, doesn't it?
In a Civil suit (which is what most of those suits are), Budget is in an uncomfortable position already. They are going to have to convince a jury that hiding the details of what they were doing doesn't represent an egregious abuse of their ability to hire a legal team to write such contracts.
There are some things you just can't sign away. Adjust your political leanings accordingly.
Okay, the information is VERY spartan so I'm mostly reading between the lines and making a guess here...
Microsoft demanded that the downloads be stopped because the binary was created using Microsoft's Xbox Dev Kit (XDK). Either something distributed in the binary, or the license restrictions on the Dev Kit forbid distributing the binary.
The source is still legally obtainable. The binary is probably available illegally through LimeWire/Kazaa/IRC.