Is given greater weight by the politicians or regulators that the corporations are lobbying or donating to. It means that the corporation view is considered first or given more importance than competing views.
I am not advocating, "wanting", or expressing a desire for any particular form of government. I was pointing out the current situation with regards to lobbying and campaign financing leads to corporations having an outsized voice with politicians and regulators compared to competing interests such as the public at large.
I don't think that people get upset about companies presenting their view. What they get upset about is the outsized voice the corporations can afford to buy. The corporate view is given far greater weight than the views of the public at large in political discourse. Since corporations have far more money than the public to spend on lobbying and advertising, and throw on for added measure campaign contributions in an effort to sway politicians to the corporate view, the result is quite predictable in that laws get passed and regulations written that favor corporations over the public interest.
Since our political process is representative, corporations can largely ignore the public and apply direct pressure to the political representatives themselves.
Of course, this is why there are many calls to reform lobbying and campaign laws to prevent those with greater financial resources from being able to essentially buy that outsized voice.
While it makes a nice sound bite to say that companies making more money will feel comfortable hiring more people and may even seem to make sense at first glance, that's not how things work. If a company can make more money without having to hire additional labor, then it will use that additional money to purchase better equipment (which will hopefully improve their labor efficiency, thus requiring less labor), pay down debt, increase stockholder dividends, buy other companies, increase advertising, etc.
You hire labor to meet demand, or expected demand such as when debuting a new product. If demand or prospect for demand isn't there, then labor needs don't increase. You don't hire simply because you have more money.
Now, as far as labor within the tech industry, what I've seen over the years is that many companies want someone else to pay the costs of training their employees. Either you were trained at another company, were taught at a university, etc. This makes sense from an economic perspective, since training is expensive. However, if everyone follows that logic, no one gets trained and the labor force as a whole becomes less capable.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Don't provide training or opportunity to gain experience, then complain the labor force doesn't have the skills you need.
H1-B and it's ilk can provide a useful function but from what I've seen of it's use in the tech industry, it's becoming another tool to externalize risk and cost.
Perhaps if the infrastructure were not owned by monopolies, your points would have more validity. However, when companies lobby for and are granted monopolies over infrastructure *and* services, they then become subject to greater regulation and scrutiny, because normal market forces such as customers switching to another provider often are no longer possible.
From an ordinary user standpoint, once upon a time you actually could choose between many different ISP's because *you* dialed *them*. Can I dial any ISP I want over Cable, or DSL, or fiber, or whatever?
That's the problem in the US today. Infrastructure has been tied to service, leaving most folks with very little choice and the market forces hogtied by government granted monopolies.
There are plenty of examples throughout the world where there is good competition at the ISP level, with consumers benefiting from better infrastructure, services, and prices. And the great majority of it is from introducing competition, not allowing monopolies to get larger and larger.
Net Neutrality probably wouldn't even be on the radar if infrastructure and services were not tied together in government granted monopolies.
Not sure how folks couldn't spot this as a hoax right off the bat. A real advertisment would have offered *paying* someone to take the children. (Free Shipping, Next Day Delivery)
"The US constitution specifically states that gold an silver are legal tender."
No, that's not what it says, although that is a commonly held misconception.
Article I, section 10: No state shall...coin money, emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts...
This is a restriction on the States powers, not the Federal government. State governments can't issue their own currency, and if States did choose to enforce a tender for payment of debts, the only tender they can enforce is gold and silver.
For example, a State could require you to pay your taxes in gold and silver. It can't issue it's own notes and force you to pay your taxes with them. Nor could it force you to pay debts with anything else. For example, they couldn't force you to pay your taxes with, say, $1 coins.
Basically, States have to accept any legal tender if they don't explicitly require payment in gold and silver. There are no Constitutional restrictions on what the Federal government can define and issue as legal tender.
In short, whatever the Federal government defines and issues as legal tender, must be accepted for payment of debt, with the exception that States have the option of requiring payment in gold and silver.
I agree in this instance that Shell is probably doing the smart thing. I did want to comment though about fiduciary responsibility, since this often comes up in subject matter like this.
Fiduciary responsibility is one of the responsibilities of a corporation, but not the *only* responsibility. Other responsibilities may be externally imposed (e.g., not break the law), or may be internally imposed (e.g., codes of conduct). These have intertwining impacts on one another, and may be at odds. For example, a Code of Conduct may negatively impact profitability, thus putting it at odds with a fiduciary responsibility to increase profit.
The combinations of these responsibilities provides the framework in which corporations can pursue their goals. One of the goals of corporations is to profit, but there can be other goals in addition.
Often times I see folks say that the fiduciary responsibility of a corporation is solely to maximize profit, but thats an oversimplification. Profit is a goal of for-profit corporations, but often not the sole goal. As such, those goals must be balanced against one another. Depending on circumstance, some goals will be scaled back so resources can be channeled to other goals.
The fiduciary responsibility of the corporation is to manage fiscal operations to further the goals of the corporation.
"If they could have justified it, why didn't they just push the law through Senate et all first? It's not like they have had that much difficutly in pushing through lots of crappy laws."
Because if they had attempted to change the laws, people would have become aware of what they wanted to do. Simpler to invoke "War Powers" and push through immunity after the fact for those that go along with questionable actions, rather than make your intents known and possibly have someone tell you "No, you can't do that".
It's an ugly state of affairs any way you look at it. The amount of money, legislation, rule-bending and even forging wars all in the name of "Fighting Terrorism" is ridiculously out of proportion. As is typically the case with politics, a boogey-man is used to justify increased scope and powers of the state.
Sure, if you think in terms of tapping an individual line, FISA worked. Now, what if you want to tap thousands or millions of calls simultaneously?
I suspect that Bush's primary reason for the warrantless wiretapping simply boils down to they didn't know exactly who/what/where to look and wanted to perform a dragnet on foreign calls. Something that would have been impossible to do under FISA.
"I REALLY don't want to have my money go further and pay for someone who is an unhealthy idiot who made poor decisions about their health and gets a free ride."
Actually, you already do. Insurance reduces risk by spreading out the costs amongst all those who pay premiums. In addition, emergency rooms are required to provide care, even for those who cannot pay. This is a cost that is also passed on to you in one form or another, either in higher fees in other areas of care or via taxation.
Americans spend more money per capita on health care than anyone else. So it's kind of hard to merit an argument that costs would go up even more under a Universal care system, since we can see that this is not the case in other countries.
In the current US model, people seek to minimize their costs. Currently, this is done by avoiding care as often as possible, but buying insurance to mitigate risks should care be unavoidable. This actually is the worst possible outcome, as it results in both poorer health and higher costs as preventative care is eschewed and more emergency care is necessary due to the lack of preventative care. This results in a feedback loop, causing people to pay more and more for insurance premiums, which causes them them to try to cut expenses more and more, which of course means preventative care is used less and less.
It just leads to a vicious cycle, with ever spiraling upward costs and demand pushed towards the opposite side of the spectrum from what would be in the best interests of all.
That's what's broken. How to fix it? There are varying opinions on how to do so, but the one thing that seems clear is that reliance on health insurance as the financial vehicle for medical costs is bass-ackwards.
"Oh, and to the posters that suggested he use the defence "I forgot it", the police arrested the guy while he was halfway through typing the key in. It's kind of hard to convincingly say you didn't know it at that point..."
I expect the police to say something like that. Now stop and think of how probable that actually is.
Perhaps that argument is valid on the Federal level, however it is not at the state and municipal levels.
Second, the assumption that the service the Government provides will be "shitty" is a generalization. As is the assumption that a privately run service will be long-term and reliable. Corporations fail, and many a customer can recite tales of the miserable service they receive from private and public entities alike.
Third, infrastructure improvements are a service which for a number of reasons often falls into the purview of Government. This is largely due to the fact that public resources are often involved, and as such the people have a right to oversee the use of those resources.
In general I am in favor of services being provided by corporations whenever possible. However, there are circumstances where it is either not possible or feasible, or the market is unwilling to provide such services. In such case, I see no issue with a community creating those on it's own. Federal level, no. The Constitution enumerates the powers of the Federal government, and therefore should be prohibited in doing so. All other powers and rights are reserved by the States and the people.
Simply put, States and municipalites are well within their legal rights to pursue such projects. As the judge rightly ruled, there was no legal basis prohibiting a community for providing it's own infrastructure and services.
Many States and communities recognize it is often more desirable to leave this to the private sector, and have crafted laws to limit it's governments from competing unfairly against private entities and often contracting such projects and services out to the private sector.
Ultimately, people have to remember that corporations are a construct of society, specifically crafted to provide the legal framework and financial incentive to provide goods and services to that society. If that construct is unable to perform it's primary reason for existence (which is to provide goods and services), then it is the people's right to construct entities to that will do so.
You can't just equate a loss to one entity as a loss to an ecomony as a whole, which the proponents of the IP laws always like to do. All theft has an economic loss, however the loss isn't based on the sales price, but the cost to produce and deliver that product which goes unrequited.
While the distributor did not receive that $79.99, someone else very likely did. So you used that $79.99 to buy something else, let's say a new coffee table. That's a loss for the IP market, but a gain for the furniture market. So while the IP industry may suffer due to this behavior and jobs lost to it, the furniture market benefits and jobs are gained in that sector.
So what is the real loss to the economy when theft occurs? The real loss is the labor and materials cost to produce the item stolen along with distribution costs.
While the production of an IP product can be just as expensive as the production of any other product, replication and distribution costs can be driven down to pennies, effectively reaching almost no cost. However, replication and distribution costs of non-IP products can only be driven down so far and will always be a significant cost. You can create and distribute a 1000 copies of an IP product for next to nothing in cost. Creating 1000 coffee tables and distributing those will cost significantly more.
If each product is priced the same per unit, which would cost society more? The theft of a 1000 copies of an IP product priced at $79.99, or the theft of a 1000 coffee tables?
All theft is bad. However, crafting laws based on numbers and logic that is flawed is also bad. IP laws create artificial monopolies. Further extending those monopolies is an economic cost also, since this removes competitive pressures to drive down the cost of the product.
However, even if IP theft were reduced to zero tomorrow, the IP industry would simply trot out another whipping boy with equally dubious arguments. It's in their economic interest to always seek stronger monopoly laws, since this will lead to higher profits.
The thing that has me curious is why they haven't been taken to court over this.
It seems to me that forging packets is both a form of communication interception, and impersonation. Which should be landing them in hot water with a number of state and federal laws.
That's the answer a lot companies would like to sell the government on, that there is a "free" market for people to choose the provider they wish.
Yet out of the other side of their mouth, they go back to the government and ask for monopolies in the areas they service so they can recoup their cost of building out infrastructure. Hell, they've even resorted to suing municipalities to prevent them from building out their own.
Truth is, for many people in the US, there is no competitive market. There is one provider in their area, and that's it.
Much as Comcast may boohoo about the FCC and whatnot, here's the schtick: You want to be a monopoly, you get regulated. End of story. Don't want that? Then don't ask for government handouts in the form of monopolies or suing competition.
While that winnows down things a little, it still isn't conclusive evidence. Home routers/firewalls that do NAT and provide wireless and 4 port switches/hubs are quite common and cheap and allow for that network port to be used by multiple machines. And almost all of them allow you to assign a MAC address to be used for DHCP purposes for the WAN port.
Yes, it is. Just because the license is crafted to give certain rights to the end-user rather than restrict rights, doesn't mean it's not an end-user license agreement.
As far as the restrictions I was referring to, it involves the restrictions for *NOT* redistributing code when you are supposed to, according to the license.
It is an end-user license agreement. It's designed to give the user the right to install, modify, and redistribute. Like any license, it comes with some restrictions and protections for the authors of the original work. In the case of the GPL, the restrictions center largely around redistribution.
In fact, the whole intent of the GPL is written largely with the end-user in mind.
The GPL exploits a loophole in copyright law that allows software to be licensed to begin with. I call it a loophole because the whole licensing nonsense circumvents much of copyright law, allowing copyright owners control over their works far exceeding that of all other forms of media.
Well, thanks to the ruling in the Blizzard case, there's been some precedent set that it may not be legit to install OSX on a non-Apple system.
In that case Blizzard made the argument that because the software was being used in a way that violated the EULA, the program being loaded into memory was therefore an unlicensed copy and violated copyright. The judge agreed.
It was a terrible ruling IMO, because this whole licensing nonsense totally trumps First Sale doctrine *and* copyright, by basically giving the copyright holder virtually unlimited control of the work.
The whole licensing scheme gives software far greater privileges than any other form of media under copyright. And as is usually the case with such laws/exceptions, they are being used to the detriment of the public.
Slashdot Mirror
Is given greater weight by the politicians or regulators that the corporations are lobbying or donating to. It means that the corporation view is considered first or given more importance than competing views.
I am not advocating, "wanting", or expressing a desire for any particular form of government. I was pointing out the current situation with regards to lobbying and campaign financing leads to corporations having an outsized voice with politicians and regulators compared to competing interests such as the public at large.
I don't think that people get upset about companies presenting their view. What they get upset about is the outsized voice the corporations can afford to buy. The corporate view is given far greater weight than the views of the public at large in political discourse. Since corporations have far more money than the public to spend on lobbying and advertising, and throw on for added measure campaign contributions in an effort to sway politicians to the corporate view, the result is quite predictable in that laws get passed and regulations written that favor corporations over the public interest.
Since our political process is representative, corporations can largely ignore the public and apply direct pressure to the political representatives themselves.
Of course, this is why there are many calls to reform lobbying and campaign laws to prevent those with greater financial resources from being able to essentially buy that outsized voice.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
-- Richelieu, Cardinal De
Screenshot or it didn't happen.
While it makes a nice sound bite to say that companies making more money will feel comfortable hiring more people and may even seem to make sense at first glance, that's not how things work. If a company can make more money without having to hire additional labor, then it will use that additional money to purchase better equipment (which will hopefully improve their labor efficiency, thus requiring less labor), pay down debt, increase stockholder dividends, buy other companies, increase advertising, etc.
You hire labor to meet demand, or expected demand such as when debuting a new product. If demand or prospect for demand isn't there, then labor needs don't increase. You don't hire simply because you have more money.
Now, as far as labor within the tech industry, what I've seen over the years is that many companies want someone else to pay the costs of training their employees. Either you were trained at another company, were taught at a university, etc. This makes sense from an economic perspective, since training is expensive. However, if everyone follows that logic, no one gets trained and the labor force as a whole becomes less capable.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Don't provide training or opportunity to gain experience, then complain the labor force doesn't have the skills you need.
H1-B and it's ilk can provide a useful function but from what I've seen of it's use in the tech industry, it's becoming another tool to externalize risk and cost.
Perhaps if the infrastructure were not owned by monopolies, your points would have more validity. However, when companies lobby for and are granted monopolies over infrastructure *and* services, they then become subject to greater regulation and scrutiny, because normal market forces such as customers switching to another provider often are no longer possible.
From an ordinary user standpoint, once upon a time you actually could choose between many different ISP's because *you* dialed *them*. Can I dial any ISP I want over Cable, or DSL, or fiber, or whatever?
That's the problem in the US today. Infrastructure has been tied to service, leaving most folks with very little choice and the market forces hogtied by government granted monopolies.
There are plenty of examples throughout the world where there is good competition at the ISP level, with consumers benefiting from better infrastructure, services, and prices. And the great majority of it is from introducing competition, not allowing monopolies to get larger and larger.
Net Neutrality probably wouldn't even be on the radar if infrastructure and services were not tied together in government granted monopolies.
Not sure how folks couldn't spot this as a hoax right off the bat. A real advertisment would have offered *paying* someone to take the children. (Free Shipping, Next Day Delivery)
The OpenOfficeMouse runs Windows, Linux, and OS/X.
Fixed.
"The US constitution specifically states that gold an silver are legal tender."
No, that's not what it says, although that is a commonly held misconception.
Article I, section 10: No state shall...coin money, emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts...
This is a restriction on the States powers, not the Federal government. State governments can't issue their own currency, and if States did choose to enforce a tender for payment of debts, the only tender they can enforce is gold and silver.
For example, a State could require you to pay your taxes in gold and silver. It can't issue it's own notes and force you to pay your taxes with them. Nor could it force you to pay debts with anything else. For example, they couldn't force you to pay your taxes with, say, $1 coins.
Basically, States have to accept any legal tender if they don't explicitly require payment in gold and silver. There are no Constitutional restrictions on what the Federal government can define and issue as legal tender.
In short, whatever the Federal government defines and issues as legal tender, must be accepted for payment of debt, with the exception that States have the option of requiring payment in gold and silver.
CAN I HAZ WISHBONE?
I agree in this instance that Shell is probably doing the smart thing. I did want to comment though about fiduciary responsibility, since this often comes up in subject matter like this.
Fiduciary responsibility is one of the responsibilities of a corporation, but not the *only* responsibility. Other responsibilities may be externally imposed (e.g., not break the law), or may be internally imposed (e.g., codes of conduct). These have intertwining impacts on one another, and may be at odds. For example, a Code of Conduct may negatively impact profitability, thus putting it at odds with a fiduciary responsibility to increase profit.
The combinations of these responsibilities provides the framework in which corporations can pursue their goals. One of the goals of corporations is to profit, but there can be other goals in addition.
Often times I see folks say that the fiduciary responsibility of a corporation is solely to maximize profit, but thats an oversimplification. Profit is a goal of for-profit corporations, but often not the sole goal. As such, those goals must be balanced against one another. Depending on circumstance, some goals will be scaled back so resources can be channeled to other goals.
The fiduciary responsibility of the corporation is to manage fiscal operations to further the goals of the corporation.
"If they could have justified it, why didn't they just push the law through Senate et all first? It's not like they have had that much difficutly in pushing through lots of crappy laws."
Because if they had attempted to change the laws, people would have become aware of what they wanted to do. Simpler to invoke "War Powers" and push through immunity after the fact for those that go along with questionable actions, rather than make your intents known and possibly have someone tell you "No, you can't do that".
It's an ugly state of affairs any way you look at it. The amount of money, legislation, rule-bending and even forging wars all in the name of "Fighting Terrorism" is ridiculously out of proportion. As is typically the case with politics, a boogey-man is used to justify increased scope and powers of the state.
Sure, if you think in terms of tapping an individual line, FISA worked. Now, what if you want to tap thousands or millions of calls simultaneously?
I suspect that Bush's primary reason for the warrantless wiretapping simply boils down to they didn't know exactly who/what/where to look and wanted to perform a dragnet on foreign calls. Something that would have been impossible to do under FISA.
"I REALLY don't want to have my money go further and pay for someone who is an unhealthy idiot who made poor decisions about their health and gets a free ride."
Actually, you already do. Insurance reduces risk by spreading out the costs amongst all those who pay premiums. In addition, emergency rooms are required to provide care, even for those who cannot pay. This is a cost that is also passed on to you in one form or another, either in higher fees in other areas of care or via taxation.
Americans spend more money per capita on health care than anyone else. So it's kind of hard to merit an argument that costs would go up even more under a Universal care system, since we can see that this is not the case in other countries.
In the current US model, people seek to minimize their costs. Currently, this is done by avoiding care as often as possible, but buying insurance to mitigate risks should care be unavoidable. This actually is the worst possible outcome, as it results in both poorer health and higher costs as preventative care is eschewed and more emergency care is necessary due to the lack of preventative care. This results in a feedback loop, causing people to pay more and more for insurance premiums, which causes them them to try to cut expenses more and more, which of course means preventative care is used less and less.
It just leads to a vicious cycle, with ever spiraling upward costs and demand pushed towards the opposite side of the spectrum from what would be in the best interests of all.
That's what's broken. How to fix it? There are varying opinions on how to do so, but the one thing that seems clear is that reliance on health insurance as the financial vehicle for medical costs is bass-ackwards.
"Oh, and to the posters that suggested he use the defence "I forgot it", the police arrested the guy while he was halfway through typing the key in. It's kind of hard to convincingly say you didn't know it at that point..."
I expect the police to say something like that. Now stop and think of how probable that actually is.
Perhaps that argument is valid on the Federal level, however it is not at the state and municipal levels.
Second, the assumption that the service the Government provides will be "shitty" is a generalization. As is the assumption that a privately run service will be long-term and reliable. Corporations fail, and many a customer can recite tales of the miserable service they receive from private and public entities alike.
Third, infrastructure improvements are a service which for a number of reasons often falls into the purview of Government. This is largely due to the fact that public resources are often involved, and as such the people have a right to oversee the use of those resources.
In general I am in favor of services being provided by corporations whenever possible. However, there are circumstances where it is either not possible or feasible, or the market is unwilling to provide such services. In such case, I see no issue with a community creating those on it's own. Federal level, no. The Constitution enumerates the powers of the Federal government, and therefore should be prohibited in doing so. All other powers and rights are reserved by the States and the people.
Simply put, States and municipalites are well within their legal rights to pursue such projects. As the judge rightly ruled, there was no legal basis prohibiting a community for providing it's own infrastructure and services.
Many States and communities recognize it is often more desirable to leave this to the private sector, and have crafted laws to limit it's governments from competing unfairly against private entities and often contracting such projects and services out to the private sector.
Ultimately, people have to remember that corporations are a construct of society, specifically crafted to provide the legal framework and financial incentive to provide goods and services to that society. If that construct is unable to perform it's primary reason for existence (which is to provide goods and services), then it is the people's right to construct entities to that will do so.
You can't just equate a loss to one entity as a loss to an ecomony as a whole, which the proponents of the IP laws always like to do. All theft has an economic loss, however the loss isn't based on the sales price, but the cost to produce and deliver that product which goes unrequited.
While the distributor did not receive that $79.99, someone else very likely did. So you used that $79.99 to buy something else, let's say a new coffee table. That's a loss for the IP market, but a gain for the furniture market. So while the IP industry may suffer due to this behavior and jobs lost to it, the furniture market benefits and jobs are gained in that sector.
So what is the real loss to the economy when theft occurs? The real loss is the labor and materials cost to produce the item stolen along with distribution costs.
While the production of an IP product can be just as expensive as the production of any other product, replication and distribution costs can be driven down to pennies, effectively reaching almost no cost. However, replication and distribution costs of non-IP products can only be driven down so far and will always be a significant cost. You can create and distribute a 1000 copies of an IP product for next to nothing in cost. Creating 1000 coffee tables and distributing those will cost significantly more.
If each product is priced the same per unit, which would cost society more? The theft of a 1000 copies of an IP product priced at $79.99, or the theft of a 1000 coffee tables?
All theft is bad. However, crafting laws based on numbers and logic that is flawed is also bad. IP laws create artificial monopolies. Further extending those monopolies is an economic cost also, since this removes competitive pressures to drive down the cost of the product.
However, even if IP theft were reduced to zero tomorrow, the IP industry would simply trot out another whipping boy with equally dubious arguments. It's in their economic interest to always seek stronger monopoly laws, since this will lead to higher profits.
The thing that has me curious is why they haven't been taken to court over this.
It seems to me that forging packets is both a form of communication interception, and impersonation. Which should be landing them in hot water with a number of state and federal laws.
That's the answer a lot companies would like to sell the government on, that there is a "free" market for people to choose the provider they wish.
Yet out of the other side of their mouth, they go back to the government and ask for monopolies in the areas they service so they can recoup their cost of building out infrastructure. Hell, they've even resorted to suing municipalities to prevent them from building out their own.
Truth is, for many people in the US, there is no competitive market. There is one provider in their area, and that's it.
Much as Comcast may boohoo about the FCC and whatnot, here's the schtick: You want to be a monopoly, you get regulated. End of story. Don't want that? Then don't ask for government handouts in the form of monopolies or suing competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing
While that winnows down things a little, it still isn't conclusive evidence. Home routers/firewalls that do NAT and provide wireless and 4 port switches/hubs are quite common and cheap and allow for that network port to be used by multiple machines. And almost all of them allow you to assign a MAC address to be used for DHCP purposes for the WAN port.
Your posting on the internet asking such a question? The irony is strong with this one.
Yes, it is. Just because the license is crafted to give certain rights to the end-user rather than restrict rights, doesn't mean it's not an end-user license agreement.
As far as the restrictions I was referring to, it involves the restrictions for *NOT* redistributing code when you are supposed to, according to the license.
It is an end-user license agreement. It's designed to give the user the right to install, modify, and redistribute. Like any license, it comes with some restrictions and protections for the authors of the original work. In the case of the GPL, the restrictions center largely around redistribution.
In fact, the whole intent of the GPL is written largely with the end-user in mind.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
The GPL exploits a loophole in copyright law that allows software to be licensed to begin with. I call it a loophole because the whole licensing nonsense circumvents much of copyright law, allowing copyright owners control over their works far exceeding that of all other forms of media.
Well, thanks to the ruling in the Blizzard case, there's been some precedent set that it may not be legit to install OSX on a non-Apple system.
In that case Blizzard made the argument that because the software was being used in a way that violated the EULA, the program being loaded into memory was therefore an unlicensed copy and violated copyright. The judge agreed.
It was a terrible ruling IMO, because this whole licensing nonsense totally trumps First Sale doctrine *and* copyright, by basically giving the copyright holder virtually unlimited control of the work.
The whole licensing scheme gives software far greater privileges than any other form of media under copyright. And as is usually the case with such laws/exceptions, they are being used to the detriment of the public.