There might be more than one party, but I think how it works is that the seller acts as an agent for the publisher, at least in a lot of cases. Much like buying something from a cashier, it's not a contract with them, it's with the store and they act as the representative of the store.
The thing is nothing changes when you open the box. If you are bound by an license it's when you buy the software, if you're not, the EULA is powerless.
This is for a bunch of contract reasons, like for everything you agree to seperately you must get "consideration" which means something of value. If you don't get something, it's not a contract. Hence the token $1 you see people use in movies.
Also, if you aren't legally entitled to use the software, then you aren't entitled to run it far enough to see the EULA. If you are entitled to run it, then the EULA is irrelevant.
No matter how you slice it, by traditional law, EULAs aren't binding and you don't need a license to use software you buy, unless you want to do something beyond what copyright law would allow. (As with distributable runtime libraries, and the GPL, etc.)
The only way this sort of stuff becomes legal is with the UCITA (Shrinkwraps, limited warranties, etc) and the DMCA (No right to use it once you've bought it.) If these laws stick around, you will find EULAs to be binding eventually, but now, no...
Isn't microsoft then using their monopoly position to restrain the trade of their competitors? (You, if you sell software someone would have otherwise purchased from them.)
You may be right though, MS could be attempting to skirt a fine line between saying they're breaking the law and saying that they broke what MS wishes the law was.
I wish someone could afford to challenge them. Money buys courts and it's incredibly disgusting.
What if tires were sold attached to a car, and the car was intended merely as a device for delivering tires. Further imagine that they intend that people, already having a car, will throw this one away once they remove the tires.
Would it be illegal, if nothing to this effect was said beforehand, for someone to purchase four tires and then continue to use the car they came attached to?
As a real example, popsicle sticks. By friends' children love these almost as much as the popsicles themselves. Now, if they keep these sticks and build with them they are depriving some company of a sale of a bag containing only the sticks.
Does this make it immoral? The children have simply discovered a second (and more long-lasting) use for the product than the manufacturer intended.
I say that if the manufactures didn't want to cut into their market for sticks they should start selling popsicles without them, maybe of a cardboard tube. But woe unto the retailers of cardboard tubes.
Gotcha. So if you find a book lying on the street, it's illegal to read it.
Oh wait, no... That's stupid.
You don't need a license to use a book or a CD. The seller gave you the rights to use both when you purchased them, to the limits of copyright law. If they didn't give you these rights, they would have to say so before the sale, because the obvious use of a book is to read and it is thus a fair expectation. The obvious use of a CD is to contain data that the buyer wishes to use.
Selling either without this permission would be like selling a car and then claiming you didn't sell the rights to drive it. The right to drive a car (at least, except for government intervention) is implicit in ownership of a car.
as a real-world example... When the champion battle-bot was being sold they didn't want you entering it next year as your own (the rules do not forbid this) or displaying it publicly. So they wrote a contract detaling this and were selling the rights to have and use the bot, except as detailed *BEFORE THE SALE*.
Had they waited until afterwords, they would have been SOL.
You are so completely wrong. However, because Slashdot lacks a "-1, Completely Stupid" moderation, someone was forced to use "-1, Flamebait". Forgive them, they were giving you the benefit of the doubt in assuming that you were merely lying instead of ignorant of the world you live in.
The only party that would tell you that purchasing a CD only "licenses" the contents to you would be a software company or a lawyer for the same.
EULAs violate basic contract law in many ways. The UCITA has been proposed (and passed in some corrupt states) as a way around this, but where it's not law, you can't be bound by a contract that you didn't know about before you agreed.
No law except the DMCA and UCITA even hints that there's a difference between a book and a CD, in what you are allowed to do with them. The only exception is that the definition of a "performance" under the Copyright act is different.
You do not need a license to read a book, as decided by judges who aren't around now to be bribed by today's megacorps, so why would you think you need a license to read data from a CD?
How about if someone sells you "Everything you can carry from my house" and forgets to chain down something they wanted to keep.
Even so, analogies of software to physical property are fundamentally flawed.
Until we get free replicators (ala Trek) physical and information property are completely seperate topics.
The issue is that if you are sold something and you use it in a way that the tool is capable of being used, but the seller didn't intend you to use, are you obliged to stop that use?
What if you buy pliers and use them to hammer small nails as well? (As another posted described.) What if you buy Photoshop and find out it also edits.WAV files if they are renamed to.BMP?
More importantly, if you did find out any of these unintended uses, should you be prevented from telling others?
So what makes you think you need one when you buy software.
What if, by some huge coincidence, the book, when read backwards, is its own sequel? But, you only bought the original book, not the sequel. Do you have any right to read it backwards? What if the pages of text also, unadvertised, function as magic-eye pictures. Do you not have a right to cross your eyes and stare at them? How about if the book was labelled "A collection of words and nothing more." Would that make it illegal?
Similarly, if you decide to rename all the files on the disk to '.MP3' and find out that they play as a beautiful symphony, are you not allowed to listen to them? Not allowed to tell anyone about this wonderful discovery?
That is the difference between licensing and owning.
But nobody licenses software when they buy it retail, despite what the companies would tell you.
For the seller to place *ANY* restrictions on the use of something they sell it must be an up-front disclosure of the conditions. If they fail to disclose any conditions until after the sale, you may freely ignore them as they are not legally binding in any way.
Imagine if I sold you a car and then once you had paid me for it, I told you that I would sue you if you bought gas for it anywhere except at my gas station. This is obviously laughable and potentially illegal depending on my words. (Threatening legal action when there is no cause is actionable (Unless you're the RIAA) and misrepresenting the law for your own gain is similarly illegal.)
So why do people believe software companies when they say these things?
Useless laws like the DMCA aside, if you buy software you are legally entitled to do anything with it that you could do with a book.
If CheckForOSX annoys you, remove it. Just the same as you might scribble in the margins of a book, or rip out a page that offends you.
If the seller intends otherwise, then they need to make it a clear part of the pre-sale agreement. EULAs and any software which try to enforce them are void at best, and illegal at worst. (Preventing someone from doing something they are entitled to do until they give you something of value (your compliance) is extortion, the same as if I demanded $50 before I'd let you use your computer which I had snuck in and passworded the night before.)
The only reason this hasn't been pursued is that nobody with enough money has been annoyed by EULAs.
Not everything which harms a company is illegal (though the way they whine, it soon will be) nor is it necessarily immoral. Imagine if you stood outside a major electronics store handing out a competitors fliers, with a lower price that the first store had promised to match. Of course, they always hope nobody tracks these deals down, but they have no right to sue you for you activities, they made the deal and should have made sure they could honor it.
If you buy a book, the publisher loses all control over that book.
However, you may enter into later contracts which would require you to do something with or to the book.
For instance, you could enter into a sales contract with someone and be required to give them the book.
They could, if they wished, pay you to burn the book, or eat it, or write a review of it.
Often when you purchase an upgrade you're agreeing to a contract you see before purchase. The company says, return the old version (or break it, or whatever) and we'll sell you the new one at a lower cost.
If you buy the upgrade in the store and it doesn't say anything about giving up the original version, then you can pretty well do with it as you will, I guess.
What you may be able to do is sue MS. By their telling EBay that you were violating a contract that they should have known (I mean really, contract law pretty well smacks EULAs around completely) you were NOT violating, I would imagine they open themselves to some liability.
I don't know what law it would be against, and it would likely be different there than in Canada anyways, but...
If it's not against the law, it should be. I mean, what would happen if I contacted a company in the middle of purchasing negotiations with MS and told the company that MS was not legally entitled to sign the contract because of prior agreements with me... Especially bad would be if I claimed MS knew they were violating the contract.
That's essentially what MS did to people trying to resell their software.
MS also pushed *heavily* for the UCITA. And the whole point of the UCITA is to make EULAs enforceable. They shouldn't be able to claim that they didn't know EULAs were enforceable when they have been busily lobbying for a law that would make them enforceable.
Yeah, it's pretty annoying. In fact, Slashdot's whole moderation system seems broken. Kuro5hin's works better imho, but even it has issues.
You missed the best way to get karma.
"I know some fanatical [anti-topic of post] moderator is going to punish me for this, but it needs to be said."
or
"I know I'm going to lose karma for this, but..."
Put either one of those in a post, the more flamebait the better, and prepare to be modded up.
I've specifically asked for a new moderation "-1, mentions karma" specifically to get rid of that kind of troll. I really feel that the moderation needs to feel like it's not there, if people post because of it (especially if that works!) then there's an issue.
I too would like a more balanced set of moderators. Even pro-MS fundies, though they piss me off to no end. I believe either ignoring them, or debating them is the answer, not knee-jerk moderations.
GPLed code is free as in speech. Show me GPLed code and I can recite that code and show it to anyone else.
There are limits of the use of it in new software (specifically, refusing to ever apply any limits, except that one.) but you can always look at the code and write a new implementation of it.
With proprietary software you can't use it for that.
With BSDL code, you can do anything you can with GPLed code, plus using it directly in non-GPLed projects.
But, how is that last part a "freedom of speech" limitation?
I think I lost more freedom through the actions of your hypothetical corporation using BSDL tcp/ip code, than I would have if they'd either written their own or used GPLed code.
As is, I can't read it, let alone speak it or copy it.
If they had used GPLed code, I would be free to examine the guts of the OS.
If they'd written their own, I still wouldn't be able to see it, speak it, or copy it. But at least they would have had to develop it on their own instead of essentially getting a handout.
Personally I think using the LGPL for proposed standards like tcp/ip is the best way to go. Anyone can implement it, speeding adoption of the standard, but any modifications of that standard automatically fall into (essentially) the public domain, helping interactivity.
And again, if we could examine MS's code (they they took from free software) we could be sure that they couldn't embrace and extend because we'd have the same ability they did, to borrow and improve on existing code.
You are correct that to make a belief rational there must be some proof. If not direct evidence, then it must fit in with a pattern you can observe to your liking. (For instance you don't know the Sun appeared to rise before you were born, but based on observational evidence now, and reports from before, you believe it to be likely that it did.)
The problem with the proof you offer is that supposing there is a god doesn't solve the issue, it just takes it back one step and asks the same question again.
All plausible models for the beginning of the universe explain how either the sum total of all matter and energy could have been created or released, or what the mechanism would be for creating more.
These are sketchy, but do fit the observable data of everything emanating outward from a small area at a fairly high rate of speed and the current state of the universe.
You can still ask how that starting condition got there, but I don't think it's simplified by calling it a god. Either way it leaves an unanswerable question, "what came before THAT."
If you examine only the issue of god existing without anything to make him, or the universe existing without an knowable cause, I suppose you could pick either and call it right with the same degree of certainty.
If you pick god as the answer, you tend to stop there.
If you pick that the universe had natural causes, then you not only explore as much of the universe as we could know directly (post-creation) but also by figuring out what could have caused the initial conditions that your theory requires.
Besides, proposing a theory is an integral part in testing it. While people might have instinctive feelings that one theory is more likely than another, neither will be accepted unless the theory is a more accurate and simpler way of explaining the experimental data, and can succesfully predict new data.
While there are no good explanations for how a universe could come into being, we have a few potentially good explanations for how we came into being after those initial pre-conditions.
So while neither "side" can offer what I feel is an acceptable answer, the scientific side is trying to discover the answer through observation and experiment. The religious side simply declared it unknowable, assumed a god, and declared it solved. This has been done before, where the religious side declares an answer to an "unknowable" question, one that fits their philosophy. Later this answer is proved wrong through observation and experiment, by the side who didn't propose a final answer, but instead offered many theories and set out to test them.
If you wish to continue, yes, you may want to move to email. Slashdot is such a pain for ongoing conversations. Email me your answer, if you wish.
I personally know very few priests, by choice on the part of both parties.
I knew some seminary students who were going to be priests though. None of them were there for what I'd call a healthy reason. Either their family nearly forced them, or they were there because they had no social prospects.
One was a closet cross-dresser while there, was discovered and kicked out. Comitted suicide a few years later after a life of petty crime.
One of others is living at home with mom, in his 40s.
The other became disillusioned with it during school but kept going because of family pressure and last I heard, was a priest. But it's been years since I've seen him.
I can't see how you get such a prevalence of abuse in church-run schools and orphanages without an opressed and unhappy priest-hood. Not unexpected though with people who make a decision to deny themselves pleasures of the flesh and then view and tiny transgression as evil.
But no, the nun-raping and abortion-forcing that the pope alluded to recently. That was done by a happy and healthy clergy.
I'm sure more priests will be happy with religion, than will the followers, overall. After all, the priests are the ones with the small measure of power. But I still think it bring uphappiness to all involved.
While, as another response to your post says, the Vatican city may be an exception, I still think that many Catholic priests, there and elsewhere, are unhappy.
Look at all the cases of their misuse of their power. Sexual abuse, rape, etc. Even the rampant hypocricy.
I think it pretty shows pretty clearly that even in the Vatican City, a wealthy and westernized "country" with a largely empowered population, that religion can bring anyone down.
You can't possibly expect any rational person to accept that religion is anything other than a cultic delusion. It is the unreasonable explanation that requires proof. If it's not BS, prove it. If you can't prove it, explain why you believe it in absense of proof, try to sound rational while doing so.
Everyone with a religious belief can be lumped into the "irrationally gullible" category. Or if you object to being lumped with the sheep, you could be one of the "facist control freaks".
The basic fact of it is that religion involves believing in something which has no proof.
It is used to control people, plain and simple. Some of the control may be benign, but that doesn't change that it *is* still control.
I have no problem with what people choose to do and believe behind their closed doors. Hell, some people like the Fox network and watch Survivor... I do have an issue when people demand equal treatment for their delusions, alongside the rational and learned opinions of scientists and scholars. I have an issue with people practising mind control on children, with people justifying the mistreatment and murder of others through mystic mumbo-jumbo.
I wouldn't accept a nation of brunettes who killed blondes on sight. Or a nation of whites who killed blacks on sight. Why is it different for a nation of religious people who kill those of other (or no) faith on sight?
Why do we let people justify their insanity based on an old and obsolete label like "religion". We need to recognize it for what it is and treat these people as if they admitted that they think squirrels run the Illuminati. Moreover, we need to be especially wary of the ones who might be driven to action based on their unsupportable views.
If you find my views distasteful, I sugest you try to counter them. But the burden of proof rests with you, you're the one making the hard claims.
But don't go around easily dismissing my words because their tone stings. I simply can't be bother to mollycoddle people over this kind of crap and don't care if I hurt your feelings when I say what needs to be said.
"Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful." - Seneca
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." - Jefferson
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot
What is good for Westerners is good for the Chinese, the Arabs, the Inuit, and everyone.
Remove a crackpot religion (ie, any religion) and any dictator that will shoot or torture them for voicing an opinion.
If the Saudis don't want say they want religious freedom it's either because a) They don't know such a thing exists or b) They know they'd be punished for saying it.
Religion is complete bullshit. To give it or any supporter of it any credibility is to do a terrible disservice to the billions of people enslaved by it.
Show me a country with a state-sponsored religion and I'll show you one with an opressed, unhappy people.
I include the Western world in this. If GW Bush wasn't religious (in his case christian) he wouldn't force his stupid values on anyone else.
Who's banning Harry Potter books? Who's stoning women who leave the house without a male relative? Who's perpetuating what is essentially the slavery of certain "castes"?
Religious nutcases, that's who.
I don't demand people have my morals. I demand that they be allowed to pick their own and discuss them freely.
Nobody chooses to be governed by religious monsters. You have a strange form of racism though, where you assume that it's good for them, because they're different. I believe everyone needs a life free of painful indoctrination where they can live freely, despite their race or birth rank.
Why should bot authors have to follow robots.txt as if it's a law or something?
Robots.txt is as much for their benefit as it is for the benefit of the site author. It saves the bot from indexing something that might confuse it, CGIs that auto-generated an infinite number of pages for example.
If the bot author knows this, and wants to see these, why shouldn't they read them?
Bringing this up in an article about google suggests that they don't follow the robots.txt (even though you didn't say it directly). And it implies you think this would have been fixed had they.
When do site authors actually have to take responsibility for this? If you really object to someone mirroring or indexing your site, block that. Either with the user agent, or by detecting sequential accesses, or something.
Wow! Thank you for sharing your incredibly insightful opinion. Everyone who likes UF must be wrong, because you don't find it funny.
Disclaimer: I don't read UF. I have no opinion on its humor either way. However, I know that PvP and PA's creators hate Illiad with a frothing passion and thus, like sheep, PvP and PA fans tend to hate UF with the same frothing passion.
You know, I haven't seen Illiad attach either of these two authors. Says a little something about his maturity.
And you know, I see a lot more UF links posted on Slashdot than PA or PvP links. Obviously it has a fairly large following of people who think it's funny enough to share with others. But, I guess they're all wrong. You no doubt are the authority on humor and thankfully have come along and schooled the lot of us. God forbid we might make the terrible mistake of breaking from the herd.
If you find something else to be funnier and more relevant, submit that. Don't insult what other people submit. It just shows you to be petty and immature. You like the Katz bashers who are too stupid to block his articles if you find him that offensive.
Yup. Much the same as dumping critical logs to the printer, as soon as they are generated. And if you're paranoid, dump SHA hashes of the other logs at certain point. (ie, the apache log, as of 11/26/01 16:04:53 was 253,035 bytes, SHA 0x84BE2C9A1029A3C1(etc))
That way you've got critical logs that a hacker can't modify, and by checking every few days (with a simple script to roll the logs back to a given size) you can tell if the less-important logs have been modified. You may not ever know what they said if they have been, but the mere fact someone other than you or the server modified the logs is a big indicator of a problem.
For this reason, dot-matrix printers are still fairly often found in server rooms.
The serial cable thing is an extension of this. It just has a computer logging the data. You may start sending corrupt data, but it's not going to a shell you had to log into so the most you could do is confuse the logging script, but you could never get data back out.
If you're *really* paranoid, cut the 'send' line from the secure server. Even if the truly 31337-hacker could break into the machine they could never get anything back out. (And they'd have to find a buffer-overflow in '>' and manage to exploit it, blind, on an unknown system...)
How about making the main site HTTP instead of FTP. Then check the referrer tag. If it's Slashdot.org, or fark.com, or K5, whatever, redirect the user to the mirrors page.
Hell, if the referrer is anything except the mirrors page, refer the user to the mirrors page.
Well, given the average national income in many of the countries we're looking at... Microsoft would have to match Pepsi's (misstated) power of *bringing back the dead*, to be worth the price.
Microsoft Win 2k Pro + Office Standard, is USD 699.
That's USD 200 less than the total yearly wage in Rwanda, which is one of the countries people are considering trying to wire.
Chine has a *much* higher average wage, almost USD 3600, but that cost is still almost a fifth of it.
I know quite a few people (of those who use Windows) who consider that they should pay for it. Despite MS's illegal practices they still believe people should be paid for their efforts. But can you imagine if the package cost between USD 9000 and USD 30,000? That's the range it effectively is in many third-world countries. Who would choose to pay that voluntarily?
Not only is hardware a more reasonable cost. After all, people are used to paying money for something that costs to make, not something you can duplicate for free, but they could get a 1.5Ghz computer with 1GB of RAM and a 40GB HD for the same price. Chances are though that they'd like to pay less for the hardware and that they'd choose to buy an old computer, maybe a P1 or low-end P2. Many businesses pay to have them taken away because they can't justify the cost of inventorying them. These computers frequently end up heading overseas to be repaired and distributed.
When you could get a complete system for $50, or one twentieth of your yearly income, do you think you could justify 15/20ths of it for a crappy OS?
Microsoft then biases this further in the direction of encouraging the pirates by refusing to let the computer legally be used with the old OSes they often still have on them. If someone boots on old copy of Win95 still installed on a P1 that technically was "upgraded" to 2k they'll say you owe them for a second license, of almost the same value as the brand new OS, despite that fact that W95 aged worse than the P1s it was run on.
Pardon the rant, but the whole MS OS thing pisses me off. They have the power to be so helpful and yet they deny people everything they can, as if there's a chance of getting some poor peasant to cough up a year's wages for an OS for some old PC. No wonder those countries ignore our copyrights, trademarks, and patents.
I know you were arguing the same point, but I just wanted to point out that unless Win2k came with a ton of rations, tools, and medicine, it couldn't match the pricetag they put on it.
At least half of the cost (to the customer) of the CD is markup by the retailer.
Roughly half of what's left is physical production (pressing discs, printing inserts) and shipping costs.
So 3/4 of the cost of a CD (again, roughly) is useless physical disks and the distribution of such.
That means that marketing, even when done in an expensive fashion, isn't the biggest cost.
Marketing by word of mouth via free MP3s and a decent website, that's free.
You might as well advertise by giving music away. Real fans will support you, and everyone who hangs onto the MP3 without paying... they wouldn't have paid anyways, so it's no skin off your nose.
Slashdot Mirror
There might be more than one party, but I think how it works is that the seller acts as an agent for the publisher, at least in a lot of cases. Much like buying something from a cashier, it's not a contract with them, it's with the store and they act as the representative of the store.
The thing is nothing changes when you open the box. If you are bound by an license it's when you buy the software, if you're not, the EULA is powerless.
This is for a bunch of contract reasons, like for everything you agree to seperately you must get "consideration" which means something of value. If you don't get something, it's not a contract. Hence the token $1 you see people use in movies.
Also, if you aren't legally entitled to use the software, then you aren't entitled to run it far enough to see the EULA. If you are entitled to run it, then the EULA is irrelevant.
No matter how you slice it, by traditional law, EULAs aren't binding and you don't need a license to use software you buy, unless you want to do something beyond what copyright law would allow. (As with distributable runtime libraries, and the GPL, etc.)
The only way this sort of stuff becomes legal is with the UCITA (Shrinkwraps, limited warranties, etc) and the DMCA (No right to use it once you've bought it.) If these laws stick around, you will find EULAs to be binding eventually, but now, no...
Isn't microsoft then using their monopoly position to restrain the trade of their competitors? (You, if you sell software someone would have otherwise purchased from them.)
You may be right though, MS could be attempting to skirt a fine line between saying they're breaking the law and saying that they broke what MS wishes the law was.
I wish someone could afford to challenge them. Money buys courts and it's incredibly disgusting.
What if tires were sold attached to a car, and the car was intended merely as a device for delivering tires. Further imagine that they intend that people, already having a car, will throw this one away once they remove the tires.
Would it be illegal, if nothing to this effect was said beforehand, for someone to purchase four tires and then continue to use the car they came attached to?
As a real example, popsicle sticks. By friends' children love these almost as much as the popsicles themselves. Now, if they keep these sticks and build with them they are depriving some company of a sale of a bag containing only the sticks.
Does this make it immoral? The children have simply discovered a second (and more long-lasting) use for the product than the manufacturer intended.
I say that if the manufactures didn't want to cut into their market for sticks they should start selling popsicles without them, maybe of a cardboard tube. But woe unto the retailers of cardboard tubes.
Gotcha. So if you find a book lying on the street, it's illegal to read it.
Oh wait, no... That's stupid.
You don't need a license to use a book or a CD. The seller gave you the rights to use both when you purchased them, to the limits of copyright law. If they didn't give you these rights, they would have to say so before the sale, because the obvious use of a book is to read and it is thus a fair expectation. The obvious use of a CD is to contain data that the buyer wishes to use.
Selling either without this permission would be like selling a car and then claiming you didn't sell the rights to drive it. The right to drive a car (at least, except for government intervention) is implicit in ownership of a car.
as a real-world example... When the champion battle-bot was being sold they didn't want you entering it next year as your own (the rules do not forbid this) or displaying it publicly. So they wrote a contract detaling this and were selling the rights to have and use the bot, except as detailed *BEFORE THE SALE*.
Had they waited until afterwords, they would have been SOL.
You are so completely wrong. However, because Slashdot lacks a "-1, Completely Stupid" moderation, someone was forced to use "-1, Flamebait". Forgive them, they were giving you the benefit of the doubt in assuming that you were merely lying instead of ignorant of the world you live in.
The only party that would tell you that purchasing a CD only "licenses" the contents to you would be a software company or a lawyer for the same.
EULAs violate basic contract law in many ways. The UCITA has been proposed (and passed in some corrupt states) as a way around this, but where it's not law, you can't be bound by a contract that you didn't know about before you agreed.
No law except the DMCA and UCITA even hints that there's a difference between a book and a CD, in what you are allowed to do with them. The only exception is that the definition of a "performance" under the Copyright act is different.
You do not need a license to read a book, as decided by judges who aren't around now to be bribed by today's megacorps, so why would you think you need a license to read data from a CD?
How about if someone sells you "Everything you can carry from my house" and forgets to chain down something they wanted to keep.
.WAV files if they are renamed to .BMP?
Even so, analogies of software to physical property are fundamentally flawed.
Until we get free replicators (ala Trek) physical and information property are completely seperate topics.
The issue is that if you are sold something and you use it in a way that the tool is capable of being used, but the seller didn't intend you to use, are you obliged to stop that use?
What if you buy pliers and use them to hammer small nails as well? (As another posted described.) What if you buy Photoshop and find out it also edits
More importantly, if you did find out any of these unintended uses, should you be prevented from telling others?
Do you need a license when you buy a book?
So what makes you think you need one when you buy software.
What if, by some huge coincidence, the book, when read backwards, is its own sequel? But, you only bought the original book, not the sequel. Do you have any right to read it backwards? What if the pages of text also, unadvertised, function as magic-eye pictures. Do you not have a right to cross your eyes and stare at them? How about if the book was labelled "A collection of words and nothing more." Would that make it illegal?
Similarly, if you decide to rename all the files on the disk to '.MP3' and find out that they play as a beautiful symphony, are you not allowed to listen to them? Not allowed to tell anyone about this wonderful discovery?
That is the difference between licensing and owning.
But nobody licenses software when they buy it retail, despite what the companies would tell you.
For the seller to place *ANY* restrictions on the use of something they sell it must be an up-front disclosure of the conditions. If they fail to disclose any conditions until after the sale, you may freely ignore them as they are not legally binding in any way.
Imagine if I sold you a car and then once you had paid me for it, I told you that I would sue you if you bought gas for it anywhere except at my gas station. This is obviously laughable and potentially illegal depending on my words. (Threatening legal action when there is no cause is actionable (Unless you're the RIAA) and misrepresenting the law for your own gain is similarly illegal.)
So why do people believe software companies when they say these things?
Lies, Damned Lies, and Everything a Lawyer Says.
Useless laws like the DMCA aside, if you buy software you are legally entitled to do anything with it that you could do with a book.
If CheckForOSX annoys you, remove it. Just the same as you might scribble in the margins of a book, or rip out a page that offends you.
If the seller intends otherwise, then they need to make it a clear part of the pre-sale agreement. EULAs and any software which try to enforce them are void at best, and illegal at worst. (Preventing someone from doing something they are entitled to do until they give you something of value (your compliance) is extortion, the same as if I demanded $50 before I'd let you use your computer which I had snuck in and passworded the night before.)
The only reason this hasn't been pursued is that nobody with enough money has been annoyed by EULAs.
Not everything which harms a company is illegal (though the way they whine, it soon will be) nor is it necessarily immoral. Imagine if you stood outside a major electronics store handing out a competitors fliers, with a lower price that the first store had promised to match. Of course, they always hope nobody tracks these deals down, but they have no right to sue you for you activities, they made the deal and should have made sure they could honor it.
Correct, with one small exception.
If you buy a book, the publisher loses all control over that book.
However, you may enter into later contracts which would require you to do something with or to the book.
For instance, you could enter into a sales contract with someone and be required to give them the book.
They could, if they wished, pay you to burn the book, or eat it, or write a review of it.
Often when you purchase an upgrade you're agreeing to a contract you see before purchase. The company says, return the old version (or break it, or whatever) and we'll sell you the new one at a lower cost.
If you buy the upgrade in the store and it doesn't say anything about giving up the original version, then you can pretty well do with it as you will, I guess.
What you may be able to do is sue MS. By their telling EBay that you were violating a contract that they should have known (I mean really, contract law pretty well smacks EULAs around completely) you were NOT violating, I would imagine they open themselves to some liability.
I don't know what law it would be against, and it would likely be different there than in Canada anyways, but...
If it's not against the law, it should be. I mean, what would happen if I contacted a company in the middle of purchasing negotiations with MS and told the company that MS was not legally entitled to sign the contract because of prior agreements with me... Especially bad would be if I claimed MS knew they were violating the contract.
That's essentially what MS did to people trying to resell their software.
MS also pushed *heavily* for the UCITA. And the whole point of the UCITA is to make EULAs enforceable. They shouldn't be able to claim that they didn't know EULAs were enforceable when they have been busily lobbying for a law that would make them enforceable.
Yeah, it's pretty annoying. In fact, Slashdot's whole moderation system seems broken. Kuro5hin's works better imho, but even it has issues.
..."
You missed the best way to get karma.
"I know some fanatical [anti-topic of post] moderator is going to punish me for this, but it needs to be said."
or
"I know I'm going to lose karma for this, but
Put either one of those in a post, the more flamebait the better, and prepare to be modded up.
I've specifically asked for a new moderation "-1, mentions karma" specifically to get rid of that kind of troll. I really feel that the moderation needs to feel like it's not there, if people post because of it (especially if that works!) then there's an issue.
I too would like a more balanced set of moderators. Even pro-MS fundies, though they piss me off to no end. I believe either ignoring them, or debating them is the answer, not knee-jerk moderations.
GPLed code is free as in speech. Show me GPLed code and I can recite that code and show it to anyone else.
There are limits of the use of it in new software (specifically, refusing to ever apply any limits, except that one.) but you can always look at the code and write a new implementation of it.
With proprietary software you can't use it for that.
With BSDL code, you can do anything you can with GPLed code, plus using it directly in non-GPLed projects.
But, how is that last part a "freedom of speech" limitation?
I think I lost more freedom through the actions of your hypothetical corporation using BSDL tcp/ip code, than I would have if they'd either written their own or used GPLed code.
As is, I can't read it, let alone speak it or copy it.
If they had used GPLed code, I would be free to examine the guts of the OS.
If they'd written their own, I still wouldn't be able to see it, speak it, or copy it. But at least they would have had to develop it on their own instead of essentially getting a handout.
Personally I think using the LGPL for proposed standards like tcp/ip is the best way to go. Anyone can implement it, speeding adoption of the standard, but any modifications of that standard automatically fall into (essentially) the public domain, helping interactivity.
And again, if we could examine MS's code (they they took from free software) we could be sure that they couldn't embrace and extend because we'd have the same ability they did, to borrow and improve on existing code.
You are correct that to make a belief rational there must be some proof. If not direct evidence, then it must fit in with a pattern you can observe to your liking. (For instance you don't know the Sun appeared to rise before you were born, but based on observational evidence now, and reports from before, you believe it to be likely that it did.)
The problem with the proof you offer is that supposing there is a god doesn't solve the issue, it just takes it back one step and asks the same question again.
All plausible models for the beginning of the universe explain how either the sum total of all matter and energy could have been created or released, or what the mechanism would be for creating more.
These are sketchy, but do fit the observable data of everything emanating outward from a small area at a fairly high rate of speed and the current state of the universe.
You can still ask how that starting condition got there, but I don't think it's simplified by calling it a god. Either way it leaves an unanswerable question, "what came before THAT."
If you examine only the issue of god existing without anything to make him, or the universe existing without an knowable cause, I suppose you could pick either and call it right with the same degree of certainty.
If you pick god as the answer, you tend to stop there.
If you pick that the universe had natural causes, then you not only explore as much of the universe as we could know directly (post-creation) but also by figuring out what could have caused the initial conditions that your theory requires.
Besides, proposing a theory is an integral part in testing it. While people might have instinctive feelings that one theory is more likely than another, neither will be accepted unless the theory is a more accurate and simpler way of explaining the experimental data, and can succesfully predict new data.
While there are no good explanations for how a universe could come into being, we have a few potentially good explanations for how we came into being after those initial pre-conditions.
So while neither "side" can offer what I feel is an acceptable answer, the scientific side is trying to discover the answer through observation and experiment. The religious side simply declared it unknowable, assumed a god, and declared it solved. This has been done before, where the religious side declares an answer to an "unknowable" question, one that fits their philosophy. Later this answer is proved wrong through observation and experiment, by the side who didn't propose a final answer, but instead offered many theories and set out to test them.
If you wish to continue, yes, you may want to move to email. Slashdot is such a pain for ongoing conversations. Email me your answer, if you wish.
I personally know very few priests, by choice on the part of both parties.
I knew some seminary students who were going to be priests though. None of them were there for what I'd call a healthy reason. Either their family nearly forced them, or they were there because they had no social prospects.
One was a closet cross-dresser while there, was discovered and kicked out. Comitted suicide a few years later after a life of petty crime.
One of others is living at home with mom, in his 40s.
The other became disillusioned with it during school but kept going because of family pressure and last I heard, was a priest. But it's been years since I've seen him.
I can't see how you get such a prevalence of abuse in church-run schools and orphanages without an opressed and unhappy priest-hood. Not unexpected though with people who make a decision to deny themselves pleasures of the flesh and then view and tiny transgression as evil.
But no, the nun-raping and abortion-forcing that the pope alluded to recently. That was done by a happy and healthy clergy.
I'm sure more priests will be happy with religion, than will the followers, overall. After all, the priests are the ones with the small measure of power. But I still think it bring uphappiness to all involved.
While, as another response to your post says, the Vatican city may be an exception, I still think that many Catholic priests, there and elsewhere, are unhappy.
Look at all the cases of their misuse of their power. Sexual abuse, rape, etc. Even the rampant hypocricy.
I think it pretty shows pretty clearly that even in the Vatican City, a wealthy and westernized "country" with a largely empowered population, that religion can bring anyone down.
You can't possibly expect any rational person to accept that religion is anything other than a cultic delusion. It is the unreasonable explanation that requires proof. If it's not BS, prove it. If you can't prove it, explain why you believe it in absense of proof, try to sound rational while doing so.
Everyone with a religious belief can be lumped into the "irrationally gullible" category. Or if you object to being lumped with the sheep, you could be one of the "facist control freaks".
The basic fact of it is that religion involves believing in something which has no proof.
It is used to control people, plain and simple. Some of the control may be benign, but that doesn't change that it *is* still control.
I have no problem with what people choose to do and believe behind their closed doors. Hell, some people like the Fox network and watch Survivor... I do have an issue when people demand equal treatment for their delusions, alongside the rational and learned opinions of scientists and scholars. I have an issue with people practising mind control on children, with people justifying the mistreatment and murder of others through mystic mumbo-jumbo.
I wouldn't accept a nation of brunettes who killed blondes on sight. Or a nation of whites who killed blacks on sight. Why is it different for a nation of religious people who kill those of other (or no) faith on sight?
Why do we let people justify their insanity based on an old and obsolete label like "religion". We need to recognize it for what it is and treat these people as if they admitted that they think squirrels run the Illuminati. Moreover, we need to be especially wary of the ones who might be driven to action based on their unsupportable views.
If you find my views distasteful, I sugest you try to counter them. But the burden of proof rests with you, you're the one making the hard claims.
But don't go around easily dismissing my words because their tone stings. I simply can't be bother to mollycoddle people over this kind of crap and don't care if I hurt your feelings when I say what needs to be said.
"Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful." - Seneca
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." - Jefferson
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot
The call of the raging fundie!
"I don't like what he says, quick, make sure nobody else hears it!"
I think you do more to prove my point than you could have if you tried.
Hah!
What is good for Westerners is good for the Chinese, the Arabs, the Inuit, and everyone.
Remove a crackpot religion (ie, any religion) and any dictator that will shoot or torture them for voicing an opinion.
If the Saudis don't want say they want religious freedom it's either because a) They don't know such a thing exists or b) They know they'd be punished for saying it.
Religion is complete bullshit. To give it or any supporter of it any credibility is to do a terrible disservice to the billions of people enslaved by it.
Show me a country with a state-sponsored religion and I'll show you one with an opressed, unhappy people.
I include the Western world in this. If GW Bush wasn't religious (in his case christian) he wouldn't force his stupid values on anyone else.
Who's banning Harry Potter books? Who's stoning women who leave the house without a male relative? Who's perpetuating what is essentially the slavery of certain "castes"?
Religious nutcases, that's who.
I don't demand people have my morals. I demand that they be allowed to pick their own and discuss them freely.
Nobody chooses to be governed by religious monsters. You have a strange form of racism though, where you assume that it's good for them, because they're different. I believe everyone needs a life free of painful indoctrination where they can live freely, despite their race or birth rank.
Why should bot authors have to follow robots.txt as if it's a law or something?
Robots.txt is as much for their benefit as it is for the benefit of the site author. It saves the bot from indexing something that might confuse it, CGIs that auto-generated an infinite number of pages for example.
If the bot author knows this, and wants to see these, why shouldn't they read them?
Bringing this up in an article about google suggests that they don't follow the robots.txt (even though you didn't say it directly). And it implies you think this would have been fixed had they.
When do site authors actually have to take responsibility for this? If you really object to someone mirroring or indexing your site, block that. Either with the user agent, or by detecting sequential accesses, or something.
Wow! Thank you for sharing your incredibly insightful opinion. Everyone who likes UF must be wrong, because you don't find it funny.
Disclaimer: I don't read UF. I have no opinion on its humor either way. However, I know that PvP and PA's creators hate Illiad with a frothing passion and thus, like sheep, PvP and PA fans tend to hate UF with the same frothing passion.
You know, I haven't seen Illiad attach either of these two authors. Says a little something about his maturity.
And you know, I see a lot more UF links posted on Slashdot than PA or PvP links. Obviously it has a fairly large following of people who think it's funny enough to share with others. But, I guess they're all wrong. You no doubt are the authority on humor and thankfully have come along and schooled the lot of us. God forbid we might make the terrible mistake of breaking from the herd.
If you find something else to be funnier and more relevant, submit that. Don't insult what other people submit. It just shows you to be petty and immature. You like the Katz bashers who are too stupid to block his articles if you find him that offensive.
Yup. Much the same as dumping critical logs to the printer, as soon as they are generated. And if you're paranoid, dump SHA hashes of the other logs at certain point. (ie, the apache log, as of 11/26/01 16:04:53 was 253,035 bytes, SHA 0x84BE2C9A1029A3C1(etc))
That way you've got critical logs that a hacker can't modify, and by checking every few days (with a simple script to roll the logs back to a given size) you can tell if the less-important logs have been modified. You may not ever know what they said if they have been, but the mere fact someone other than you or the server modified the logs is a big indicator of a problem.
For this reason, dot-matrix printers are still fairly often found in server rooms.
The serial cable thing is an extension of this. It just has a computer logging the data. You may start sending corrupt data, but it's not going to a shell you had to log into so the most you could do is confuse the logging script, but you could never get data back out.
If you're *really* paranoid, cut the 'send' line from the secure server. Even if the truly 31337-hacker could break into the machine they could never get anything back out. (And they'd have to find a buffer-overflow in '>' and manage to exploit it, blind, on an unknown system...)
How about making the main site HTTP instead of FTP. Then check the referrer tag. If it's Slashdot.org, or fark.com, or K5, whatever, redirect the user to the mirrors page.
Hell, if the referrer is anything except the mirrors page, refer the user to the mirrors page.
Well, given the average national income in many of the countries we're looking at... Microsoft would have to match Pepsi's (misstated) power of *bringing back the dead*, to be worth the price.
Microsoft Win 2k Pro + Office Standard, is USD 699.
That's USD 200 less than the total yearly wage in Rwanda, which is one of the countries people are considering trying to wire.
Chine has a *much* higher average wage, almost USD 3600, but that cost is still almost a fifth of it.
I know quite a few people (of those who use Windows) who consider that they should pay for it. Despite MS's illegal practices they still believe people should be paid for their efforts. But can you imagine if the package cost between USD 9000 and USD 30,000? That's the range it effectively is in many third-world countries. Who would choose to pay that voluntarily?
Not only is hardware a more reasonable cost. After all, people are used to paying money for something that costs to make, not something you can duplicate for free, but they could get a 1.5Ghz computer with 1GB of RAM and a 40GB HD for the same price. Chances are though that they'd like to pay less for the hardware and that they'd choose to buy an old computer, maybe a P1 or low-end P2. Many businesses pay to have them taken away because they can't justify the cost of inventorying them. These computers frequently end up heading overseas to be repaired and distributed.
When you could get a complete system for $50, or one twentieth of your yearly income, do you think you could justify 15/20ths of it for a crappy OS?
Microsoft then biases this further in the direction of encouraging the pirates by refusing to let the computer legally be used with the old OSes they often still have on them. If someone boots on old copy of Win95 still installed on a P1 that technically was "upgraded" to 2k they'll say you owe them for a second license, of almost the same value as the brand new OS, despite that fact that W95 aged worse than the P1s it was run on.
Pardon the rant, but the whole MS OS thing pisses me off. They have the power to be so helpful and yet they deny people everything they can, as if there's a chance of getting some poor peasant to cough up a year's wages for an OS for some old PC. No wonder those countries ignore our copyrights, trademarks, and patents.
I know you were arguing the same point, but I just wanted to point out that unless Win2k came with a ton of rations, tools, and medicine, it couldn't match the pricetag they put on it.
Not at all.
... they wouldn't have paid anyways, so it's no skin off your nose.
At least half of the cost (to the customer) of the CD is markup by the retailer.
Roughly half of what's left is physical production (pressing discs, printing inserts) and shipping costs.
So 3/4 of the cost of a CD (again, roughly) is useless physical disks and the distribution of such.
That means that marketing, even when done in an expensive fashion, isn't the biggest cost.
Marketing by word of mouth via free MP3s and a decent website, that's free.
You might as well advertise by giving music away. Real fans will support you, and everyone who hangs onto the MP3 without paying