Oh yeah, there's a huge market for digital cameras in Albania. People display the pictures on their PCs.
Oh wait. Most places where the yearly wage is under USD1000, most people won't have PCs and will be buying food instead of renting cameras.
This rental scheme might be good if you needed a Camera *now* and didn't care about quality. But the resolution is low and the price doesn't look much better than film. If it allows people to browse the pictures and delete crap to make room for more shots it might be good.
But anyways, if you're willing to pay $15 or so to rent a camera, you're probably in the market to buy one. The fact that 3Mp cameras are under a grand makes 1Mp cameras about $150...
Well, it used to. Now it doesn't. If you buy a new Tivo withou the service is bitches and complains all the time that you need to buy the service, it won't record for more than thirty minutes, and won't label shows (or let you manually.
Old Tivos work fine, unless you plug them into the phone, at which point they download the upgrade and start functioning as the new Tivos. But, you have to plug them in because the time drifts fairly badly if you don't.
Tivo's rep called users of the Tivo who didn't subscribe "freeloaders" and said that they *might* fix this "accidental" upgrade in v2.5.
The old hardware used to sell with a notice saying it would work without the service but would be so much more with it. Now they say it won't work without (and boy are they right). The only problem is that they broke old machines without telling the owners and are now blaming the owners for expecting the device to function as it claimed on the box.
Don't buy a Tivo, they're essentially crooks because they defraud their customers like this.
Real admins will tell you that you shouldn't go throwing patches on production machines until they've been tested, either by you on a redundant machine or by the community at large.
Exploit code and exact details let you rig together protection with a firewall, or turning off an optional service, until you feel that a suitable patch is available.
This seems like a great way to quickly remove heat from a small area and spread it to a large area. You'll still have a lot of waste heat on the hot side of this and I'm sure you'll need a heatsink on there. Large than before in fact because this appears to be a powered thermocouple like a Peltier cooler which means it should generate waste heat as well.
The benefit though is that heatsinks become more efficient as the temperature gradient goes up, so we should still be able to get the heat into the air and then out of the case. And because this thermocouple maintains a rather large gradient we should be able to keep the CPU that much cooler.
As for the little dots of it, etc... I think what they mean is that inside the CPU core you'd have little dots of this being used to pump heat away from the main heat generating areas directly into the heat-spreader on top of the chip. The only other way to do it is let the heat diffuse through the whole core and then into the heat spreader.
So this would be a lot better at putting heat in manageable areas (the heatsink) but it isn't magic, you couldn't put a bit in a sealed package and have heat magically disappear.
"A light year is the distance traveled by light in a year."
That's not really a tautology, it's a definition.
The tautology is to then use that definition to attempt to define the original.
"Light travels one light-year in a year."
Is a tautology.
The only reason it's not really clear is that "Light Year" is a phrase which is pretty straight forward and doesn't need a lot of explaning so the definition sounds a bit redundant and circular.
He might be able to help the platform get better if he sees that he could use it and save buying an expensive new system by doing so.
Now that most desktops are using PCI, the hardware that lets a Mac do this can let a PC do it. Much like the GeForce cards make the Mac a potential gaming station.
There are a few components. Hardware, drivers, OS, software, and filters. I'm assuming he understands the hardware, and the drivers I've heard do exist for Linux (for one high-end brand anyways.) The OS has multi-media patches that do better things for the latency than anything the Mac could do before OSX and probably match it.
So it's the software. Does the photoshop equivalent for sound (whatever that is) exist for Linux? Or even something close like to that, like GIMP to Photosop?
Then an issue would be purchasing filters for it, like with Sound Forge and Photoshop, much of the strength is adding third-party effects. Could these be emulated? (It should be 'easy', filters shouldn't interact with the OS much and the API is public (or nobody could write filters).)
And yes, if there is competition, we all benefit. I think we all benefit as well by Linux doing well. Not only is it usable on Macs, but it's strong potential competion for MacOS which might help Apple stay on the OSX road as well as getting Microsoft to make XP more stable than before.
I heard (from this thread) that one of the makers of pro-level hardware had Linux drivers for their PCI cards.
I imagine most of the cards would be "fairly" easy to support. They're "just" a sound card, right? A very good one maybe, but still, just a way of reading one or more sound streams and playing others? I doubt you'd get into trade-secret area here, which means you'd probably get more developer support in writing the driver.
I know a bit of what-for I speak. My company makes ATM networking cards which share no hardware in common with a 3-com ethernet card, yet our beta-level driver we've written for Linux are very close, code wise, to the 3-com ethernet drivers. Some of the hardware dependant stuff is different of course, but the basic packet assembly stuff is very similar. Any skilled Linux hacker could write drivers for our card in a weekend based on the Windows binaries. It's be a single afternoon if he had source.
OT: I wasn't saying Linux was a possibility, but I can definately see reasons for saying "No Macs". If I was asking I'd do the same thing. I've got a ton of high-end PC hardware and no Mac hardware. I'm sure if I wanted to buy something from scratch I could consider a Mac as well as a PC, but I'd prefer to use my existing hardware. Thus if I asked about options I'd ask for PC options. If I was ready to buy a new system I'd call a few pro-audio houses and ask what they used instead.
Why can't one computer be good at everything? Or, at any rate, everything its hardware is capable of?
Why can't a PCI sound card that plugs into a Mac plug into a PC and work with software on either computer?
The hardware is a Mac is no better than good PC hardware, so there's no reason a Mac should be needed.
Perhaps things are done on a Mac now, but that's likely because just because it always was that way. I know many artists who insist on using Mac's but when you watch them it's obvious they do so because they're computer illiterate and use the minimum the need to get around, so they use the same system they used in school. (Of course I know some PC users like this too...)
Anyways, the point is that things may be done on a Mac now, but there's no physical reason why they have to be. What's wrong with looking for a Linux solution and if one doesn't exist, trying to construct it? Eventually it'll be a better platform and cheaper. Or do you not like the idea of bringing powerful tools to the masses? (This isn't an idle question, some developers hate how anyone can download Perl and write a program, instead of having to buy a compiler or download DJGPP, etc. They like keeping the power in the hands of a privelleged few.)
If those young kids can't do the job properly, I don't see what your problem is. Anyone who knows this will continue to hire a professional.
When you need to worry is when those same kids can do the job just as well as someone billing five times as much. That's when the expensive guy will be completely out of a job.
It wasn't off topic for the question, just off topic for the message it was a reply to. It was also a troll. People often post trolls as replies to highly moderated posts so that their troll gets seen.
Why was it a troll? Because it had no useful content and brought up Macs vs PCs. I can think of many reasons to not use a Mac for audio (and to not use a PC). The point is not that one or the other is bad, but that there are valid reasons. Perhaps the person is question has PC hardware and wants to use it. Linux is free, MacOS is cheap but you've got to purchase the Mac to run it on.
As such, the "Not Mac" in the question was valid, and questioning it in such a way was very troll-like. Even if not an intentional troll, it was likely to cause a flame-war for no reason.
Stephen King didn't do it right. He decided he's do it as long as "piracy didn't go over 50%", but he's evidently too stupid to realize that's a broken way to do it.
As soon as he announced that, many people decided to download the ebook quite a few times just to sabotage him. Other users felt (unlike SK) that if they bought the book, they deserved to be able to read it in multiple formats and they downloaded two copies, HTML and Palm reader, or such.
When SK discontinued the book (after making upwards of a million dollars) he screwed over the fans who had paid for it, all to spite a couple of script kiddies with perl scripts.
If someone else tried this, with a set $ value per chapter instead of a % of downloads, they'd probably do just fine. But I doubt people will shell out for a book which may never be finished. I think authors have to be prepared to write the whole thing on spec, instead of charging piecemeal.
The record companies don't "have good contacts". They *own* the contacts. The ones they don't own they bribe. Look into ClearChannel and the payola scams.
If anyone tries to go it on their own I bet they'll be black-listed completely out of business.
I'm sure the industry would love that. Nobody could prove how many songs were traded online so they'd release a couple songs to get people's attention and then claim rampant copying when they felt like quitting.
They'd come out looking like the good guys, after all, it was the users who didn't do the right thing... Just like Stephen King and his bullshit with "The Plant". He ran out of time so he stopped writing it (leaving everyone who had bought the first parts in the lurch) and blamed it on piracy. What an ass.
I really never cared about MP3s until now, but I'll definately encourage people to download MP3s from copy protected discs instead of paying for them. It's getting to the point where we need to fight this shit instead of sitting and taking it.
Well, American criminals destroyed property belonging to the East India company... Tea I think. Much the same as Palistinians destroying a KFC during a riot.
And then there's all the armed terrorists killing to legally appointed authorities. Those red-coated British soldiers were sent there by the same country that sent many of the settlers in the first place.
The winners write history, the US won, so they became freedom fighters. If they'd lost, they'd have been cowardly terrorists destroying valuable property and killing innocents from hiding.
There's a big difference between being to blame, and understanding that your actions influenced those of the attacker.
Rape victims are not to blame, yet we counsel women against wearing mini-skirts and walking through dark alleys. When they get raped we don't blame them, but we explain that until the world is perfect, their exercising certain freedoms will make them victims more often.
In such a way, America did encourage the attacks.
Were they justified? Did the 6000 people who were killed deserve it? etc.
Probably not. But, do the Afghani people who get in the way of the falling bombs deserve it?
And, who deserves to suffer more, an American who might have *voted* for Bush, or an Afghani who likely is completely against their government?
Really, I don't think either deserves to suffer, but you must realize that Osama is simply fighting for what he believes in, the same as we are.
Now, this isn't to say that we should roll over and give in. But we need to understand that the other side sees us exactly as we see them. This should give us insight into handling the situation. If we respond with what they see as terrorism, we encourage them to respond similarly. We probably do "need" to kill a few people here, but despite what's adequate proof in our eyes as to Osama's guilt, we'd get a lot farther if we could capture him and the UN could try him for war crimes than if we blow him and a bunch of civilians up.
If we go the UN Trial way, we show we've got world support. People also make bad martyrs when their crimes are detailed and they're shown kicking limply at the end of a rope. However, if they die from a terrorist bomb, they become the perfect martyr.
There're certainly more than two ways "send in operatives, they all die" and "bomb the country for a few weeks".
Plenty of foreigners managed to live in Afghanistan until we started attacking them, if we has tried I'm sure we could either have gotten a sniper and some backup, or a spotter for laser-guided bombs into the country and in position to take out almost anyone we wanted.
Osama declared war against the west, so by your logic we should just accept civilian casualties as "part of war" and deal with him as an honorable enemy?
Or not? Was it really bad when he killed our civilians, but okay when we kill ones who just happen to be in the same country as him?
Why is a glorious war justified when we want it, but never when the enemy wants it?
Your blanket justification of everything done in "War" is very convenient. I'm gonna stop by your place tonight, shoot you, rape your sister, and steal your stuff. But don't worry, it's a war, it's acceptable.
Gotcha. Osama (and how the US is k-rad to opposing him) is on-topic anywhere, but to suggest that to the civilians getting bombed that the distinctions between terrorist and freedom fighter might be of little comfort. Oh no, that's off topic.
If you actually cared about avoiding uselss posts you'd have skipped on by. The fact that you feel it necessary to post about this means that you in fact are interested in censoring a non-PC view.
Ditto. It's very commendable. Anything else is suicidal and indicates a mental disease.
But, it doesn't always come down to us vs them, and even if it does, who is them?
In the US, 55.3% of the population voted (in '96, last year I could find numbers for). If we pretend that it was only Bush and Gore, and assume the same turnout, Bush got the support of 27% of the voters. Now, if the US does something, can I blame you? Or are you going to say "I didn't vote for him!"
Then consider afghanistan where nobody voted for the Taliban, and except for a few people who gain power from them, they seem universally despised by the people they claim to represent. Now, to blame them for the actions of Osama, who isn't even part of that government...
If the US people weren't calling for blood and Dubya wasn't a jingoist prick, they'd have gone in, assasinated a few key people, snatched a few others, and it'd be done.
The "us vs them" isn't the only choice and it's unfair to represent it as such.
Pay attention to context. That bit you quotes was from a Q&A and is only half of the question.
It was Q: "But *COPYRIGHT LAW* prevents... and I didn't agree to it."
I don't know about you, but nobody gave me a license agreement before implementing copyright law.
Now, as to your completely lack of comprehension of the OTHER issue...
You aren't bound by the EULA because you don't see it until you've bought the product. As that point you can (honestly) write the EULA out, sign your name, IN BLOOD, in front of a Notary and mail it to MS and it won't be binding. When you "agree" to an EULA you don't get anything in return so it's not a valid contract. As such, saying "I Agree" is meaningless legally.
And now, you don't "get the right to use the software." Your got that right when you paid the clerk at the store. After that, Microsoft (and the store) lost all ability to control what you do with it.
Actually, you don't buy the OEM version because stores will (supposedly) refuse to sell it to you if you don't buy a system, or some piece of hardware they can claim is a system (HD, etc).
That Microsoft sells two identical copies of the software for a different prices implies no liability on you to use one or the other. (Unless you are shown a contract regarding the usage of them, before you purchase.)
EULAs aren't valid contracts. You didn't see them before you bought the software and they attempt to keep you from using the software until you agree to their limitations, even though you purchased it.
Ask any lawyer if you can sell someone a product (a car for instance) and then hold them to a contract which you taped over the ignition. They'll all laugh at you.
How much does MS pay you to post lies on sites like Slashdot? Don't you know it's illegal in most countries for people to deliberately mislead others in legal matters?
The property rights of the seller are taken care of perfectly well by copyright law. The EULA doesn't concern itself in any way with MS's property rights, its only purpose is to deprive you of your rights to use the property you purchased.
But the EULA isn't valid for so many reasons I won't begin to list them all. *If* they showed you the license before you bought the software it might be different.
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Oh yeah, there's a huge market for digital cameras in Albania. People display the pictures on their PCs.
Oh wait. Most places where the yearly wage is under USD1000, most people won't have PCs and will be buying food instead of renting cameras.
This rental scheme might be good if you needed a Camera *now* and didn't care about quality. But the resolution is low and the price doesn't look much better than film. If it allows people to browse the pictures and delete crap to make room for more shots it might be good.
But anyways, if you're willing to pay $15 or so to rent a camera, you're probably in the market to buy one. The fact that 3Mp cameras are under a grand makes 1Mp cameras about $150...
Well, it used to. Now it doesn't. If you buy a new Tivo withou the service is bitches and complains all the time that you need to buy the service, it won't record for more than thirty minutes, and won't label shows (or let you manually.
Old Tivos work fine, unless you plug them into the phone, at which point they download the upgrade and start functioning as the new Tivos. But, you have to plug them in because the time drifts fairly badly if you don't.
Tivo's rep called users of the Tivo who didn't subscribe "freeloaders" and said that they *might* fix this "accidental" upgrade in v2.5.
The old hardware used to sell with a notice saying it would work without the service but would be so much more with it. Now they say it won't work without (and boy are they right). The only problem is that they broke old machines without telling the owners and are now blaming the owners for expecting the device to function as it claimed on the box.
Don't buy a Tivo, they're essentially crooks because they defraud their customers like this.
Real admins will tell you that you shouldn't go throwing patches on production machines until they've been tested, either by you on a redundant machine or by the community at large.
Exploit code and exact details let you rig together protection with a firewall, or turning off an optional service, until you feel that a suitable patch is available.
I agree with your conclusions.
This seems like a great way to quickly remove heat from a small area and spread it to a large area. You'll still have a lot of waste heat on the hot side of this and I'm sure you'll need a heatsink on there. Large than before in fact because this appears to be a powered thermocouple like a Peltier cooler which means it should generate waste heat as well.
The benefit though is that heatsinks become more efficient as the temperature gradient goes up, so we should still be able to get the heat into the air and then out of the case. And because this thermocouple maintains a rather large gradient we should be able to keep the CPU that much cooler.
As for the little dots of it, etc... I think what they mean is that inside the CPU core you'd have little dots of this being used to pump heat away from the main heat generating areas directly into the heat-spreader on top of the chip. The only other way to do it is let the heat diffuse through the whole core and then into the heat spreader.
So this would be a lot better at putting heat in manageable areas (the heatsink) but it isn't magic, you couldn't put a bit in a sealed package and have heat magically disappear.
"A light year is the distance traveled by light in a year."
That's not really a tautology, it's a definition.
The tautology is to then use that definition to attempt to define the original.
"Light travels one light-year in a year."
Is a tautology.
The only reason it's not really clear is that "Light Year" is a phrase which is pretty straight forward and doesn't need a lot of explaning so the definition sounds a bit redundant and circular.
He might be able to help the platform get better if he sees that he could use it and save buying an expensive new system by doing so.
Now that most desktops are using PCI, the hardware that lets a Mac do this can let a PC do it. Much like the GeForce cards make the Mac a potential gaming station.
There are a few components. Hardware, drivers, OS, software, and filters. I'm assuming he understands the hardware, and the drivers I've heard do exist for Linux (for one high-end brand anyways.) The OS has multi-media patches that do better things for the latency than anything the Mac could do before OSX and probably match it.
So it's the software. Does the photoshop equivalent for sound (whatever that is) exist for Linux? Or even something close like to that, like GIMP to Photosop?
Then an issue would be purchasing filters for it, like with Sound Forge and Photoshop, much of the strength is adding third-party effects. Could these be emulated? (It should be 'easy', filters shouldn't interact with the OS much and the API is public (or nobody could write filters).)
And yes, if there is competition, we all benefit. I think we all benefit as well by Linux doing well. Not only is it usable on Macs, but it's strong potential competion for MacOS which might help Apple stay on the OSX road as well as getting Microsoft to make XP more stable than before.
I heard (from this thread) that one of the makers of pro-level hardware had Linux drivers for their PCI cards.
I imagine most of the cards would be "fairly" easy to support. They're "just" a sound card, right? A very good one maybe, but still, just a way of reading one or more sound streams and playing others? I doubt you'd get into trade-secret area here, which means you'd probably get more developer support in writing the driver.
I know a bit of what-for I speak. My company makes ATM networking cards which share no hardware in common with a 3-com ethernet card, yet our beta-level driver we've written for Linux are very close, code wise, to the 3-com ethernet drivers. Some of the hardware dependant stuff is different of course, but the basic packet assembly stuff is very similar. Any skilled Linux hacker could write drivers for our card in a weekend based on the Windows binaries. It's be a single afternoon if he had source.
OT: I wasn't saying Linux was a possibility, but I can definately see reasons for saying "No Macs". If I was asking I'd do the same thing. I've got a ton of high-end PC hardware and no Mac hardware. I'm sure if I wanted to buy something from scratch I could consider a Mac as well as a PC, but I'd prefer to use my existing hardware. Thus if I asked about options I'd ask for PC options. If I was ready to buy a new system I'd call a few pro-audio houses and ask what they used instead.
Why can't one computer be good at everything? Or, at any rate, everything its hardware is capable of?
Why can't a PCI sound card that plugs into a Mac plug into a PC and work with software on either computer?
The hardware is a Mac is no better than good PC hardware, so there's no reason a Mac should be needed.
Perhaps things are done on a Mac now, but that's likely because just because it always was that way. I know many artists who insist on using Mac's but when you watch them it's obvious they do so because they're computer illiterate and use the minimum the need to get around, so they use the same system they used in school. (Of course I know some PC users like this too...)
Anyways, the point is that things may be done on a Mac now, but there's no physical reason why they have to be. What's wrong with looking for a Linux solution and if one doesn't exist, trying to construct it? Eventually it'll be a better platform and cheaper. Or do you not like the idea of bringing powerful tools to the masses? (This isn't an idle question, some developers hate how anyone can download Perl and write a program, instead of having to buy a compiler or download DJGPP, etc. They like keeping the power in the hands of a privelleged few.)
If those young kids can't do the job properly, I don't see what your problem is. Anyone who knows this will continue to hire a professional.
When you need to worry is when those same kids can do the job just as well as someone billing five times as much. That's when the expensive guy will be completely out of a job.
It wasn't off topic for the question, just off topic for the message it was a reply to. It was also a troll. People often post trolls as replies to highly moderated posts so that their troll gets seen.
Why was it a troll? Because it had no useful content and brought up Macs vs PCs. I can think of many reasons to not use a Mac for audio (and to not use a PC). The point is not that one or the other is bad, but that there are valid reasons. Perhaps the person is question has PC hardware and wants to use it. Linux is free, MacOS is cheap but you've got to purchase the Mac to run it on.
As such, the "Not Mac" in the question was valid, and questioning it in such a way was very troll-like. Even if not an intentional troll, it was likely to cause a flame-war for no reason.
Simple. They'll sell their old licenses on eBay.
Stephen King didn't do it right. He decided he's do it as long as "piracy didn't go over 50%", but he's evidently too stupid to realize that's a broken way to do it.
As soon as he announced that, many people decided to download the ebook quite a few times just to sabotage him. Other users felt (unlike SK) that if they bought the book, they deserved to be able to read it in multiple formats and they downloaded two copies, HTML and Palm reader, or such.
When SK discontinued the book (after making upwards of a million dollars) he screwed over the fans who had paid for it, all to spite a couple of script kiddies with perl scripts.
If someone else tried this, with a set $ value per chapter instead of a % of downloads, they'd probably do just fine. But I doubt people will shell out for a book which may never be finished. I think authors have to be prepared to write the whole thing on spec, instead of charging piecemeal.
The record companies don't "have good contacts". They *own* the contacts. The ones they don't own they bribe. Look into ClearChannel and the payola scams.
If anyone tries to go it on their own I bet they'll be black-listed completely out of business.
I'm sure the industry would love that. Nobody could prove how many songs were traded online so they'd release a couple songs to get people's attention and then claim rampant copying when they felt like quitting.
They'd come out looking like the good guys, after all, it was the users who didn't do the right thing... Just like Stephen King and his bullshit with "The Plant". He ran out of time so he stopped writing it (leaving everyone who had bought the first parts in the lurch) and blamed it on piracy. What an ass.
I really never cared about MP3s until now, but I'll definately encourage people to download MP3s from copy protected discs instead of paying for them. It's getting to the point where we need to fight this shit instead of sitting and taking it.
Well, American criminals destroyed property belonging to the East India company... Tea I think. Much the same as Palistinians destroying a KFC during a riot.
And then there's all the armed terrorists killing to legally appointed authorities. Those red-coated British soldiers were sent there by the same country that sent many of the settlers in the first place.
The winners write history, the US won, so they became freedom fighters. If they'd lost, they'd have been cowardly terrorists destroying valuable property and killing innocents from hiding.
There's a big difference between being to blame, and understanding that your actions influenced those of the attacker.
Rape victims are not to blame, yet we counsel women against wearing mini-skirts and walking through dark alleys. When they get raped we don't blame them, but we explain that until the world is perfect, their exercising certain freedoms will make them victims more often.
In such a way, America did encourage the attacks.
Were they justified? Did the 6000 people who were killed deserve it? etc.
Probably not. But, do the Afghani people who get in the way of the falling bombs deserve it?
And, who deserves to suffer more, an American who might have *voted* for Bush, or an Afghani who likely is completely against their government?
Really, I don't think either deserves to suffer, but you must realize that Osama is simply fighting for what he believes in, the same as we are.
Now, this isn't to say that we should roll over and give in. But we need to understand that the other side sees us exactly as we see them. This should give us insight into handling the situation. If we respond with what they see as terrorism, we encourage them to respond similarly. We probably do "need" to kill a few people here, but despite what's adequate proof in our eyes as to Osama's guilt, we'd get a lot farther if we could capture him and the UN could try him for war crimes than if we blow him and a bunch of civilians up.
If we go the UN Trial way, we show we've got world support. People also make bad martyrs when their crimes are detailed and they're shown kicking limply at the end of a rope. However, if they die from a terrorist bomb, they become the perfect martyr.
That's what we have operatives for.
There're certainly more than two ways "send in operatives, they all die" and "bomb the country for a few weeks".
Plenty of foreigners managed to live in Afghanistan until we started attacking them, if we has tried I'm sure we could either have gotten a sniper and some backup, or a spotter for laser-guided bombs into the country and in position to take out almost anyone we wanted.
So?
Osama declared war against the west, so by your logic we should just accept civilian casualties as "part of war" and deal with him as an honorable enemy?
Or not? Was it really bad when he killed our civilians, but okay when we kill ones who just happen to be in the same country as him?
Why is a glorious war justified when we want it, but never when the enemy wants it?
Your blanket justification of everything done in "War" is very convenient. I'm gonna stop by your place tonight, shoot you, rape your sister, and steal your stuff. But don't worry, it's a war, it's acceptable.
Gotcha. Osama (and how the US is k-rad to opposing him) is on-topic anywhere, but to suggest that to the civilians getting bombed that the distinctions between terrorist and freedom fighter might be of little comfort. Oh no, that's off topic.
If you actually cared about avoiding uselss posts you'd have skipped on by. The fact that you feel it necessary to post about this means that you in fact are interested in censoring a non-PC view.
Grow up.
"When it comes down to me vs them, I choose them"
Ditto. It's very commendable. Anything else is suicidal and indicates a mental disease.
But, it doesn't always come down to us vs them, and even if it does, who is them?
In the US, 55.3% of the population voted (in '96, last year I could find numbers for). If we pretend that it was only Bush and Gore, and assume the same turnout, Bush got the support of 27% of the voters. Now, if the US does something, can I blame you? Or are you going to say "I didn't vote for him!"
Then consider afghanistan where nobody voted for the Taliban, and except for a few people who gain power from them, they seem universally despised by the people they claim to represent. Now, to blame them for the actions of Osama, who isn't even part of that government...
If the US people weren't calling for blood and Dubya wasn't a jingoist prick, they'd have gone in, assasinated a few key people, snatched a few others, and it'd be done.
The "us vs them" isn't the only choice and it's unfair to represent it as such.
Pay attention to context. That bit you quotes was from a Q&A and is only half of the question.
... and I didn't agree to it."
It was Q: "But *COPYRIGHT LAW* prevents
I don't know about you, but nobody gave me a license agreement before implementing copyright law.
Now, as to your completely lack of comprehension of the OTHER issue...
You aren't bound by the EULA because you don't see it until you've bought the product. As that point you can (honestly) write the EULA out, sign your name, IN BLOOD, in front of a Notary and mail it to MS and it won't be binding. When you "agree" to an EULA you don't get anything in return so it's not a valid contract. As such, saying "I Agree" is meaningless legally.
And now, you don't "get the right to use the software." Your got that right when you paid the clerk at the store. After that, Microsoft (and the store) lost all ability to control what you do with it.
Actually, you don't buy the OEM version because stores will (supposedly) refuse to sell it to you if you don't buy a system, or some piece of hardware they can claim is a system (HD, etc).
That Microsoft sells two identical copies of the software for a different prices implies no liability on you to use one or the other. (Unless you are shown a contract regarding the usage of them, before you purchase.)
You know, lying makes baby jesus cry!
EULAs aren't valid contracts. You didn't see them before you bought the software and they attempt to keep you from using the software until you agree to their limitations, even though you purchased it.
Ask any lawyer if you can sell someone a product (a car for instance) and then hold them to a contract which you taped over the ignition. They'll all laugh at you.
How much does MS pay you to post lies on sites like Slashdot? Don't you know it's illegal in most countries for people to deliberately mislead others in legal matters?
No. They *want* to make a living. This in no way implies that we are obligated to provide them with one.
They can play by the same rules as everyone else has and if they can't make their money legitimately, fuck em.
The property rights of the seller are taken care of perfectly well by copyright law. The EULA doesn't concern itself in any way with MS's property rights, its only purpose is to deprive you of your rights to use the property you purchased.
But the EULA isn't valid for so many reasons I won't begin to list them all. *If* they showed you the license before you bought the software it might be different.
This might be true, if they told you this in the store and you actually got to read the license before purchase.
... and I didn't agree to it!"
But, they don't, and you didn't, so it's not.
Once you've purchased something outright, the seller can't attach any limitations to it. If they wanted to, the time was before sale.
Q: "but copyright law prevents
A: Copyright law is a law, not a contract between buyer and seller. You similarly can't legally use the software to break any other laws.