Why shouldn't we annoy them out of existance? If it was in my power, I'd shut them down right now.
They threatened legal action against people doing perfectly legal things. That's basically the same as me threatening to break the legs of a toddler who pissed me off.
They're using their large cash reserves to intimidate. The threat is that they'll sue you into the stone ages and take everything you have with huge damage judgements.
Well, fair is fair... they want to ruin people who don't do what they want, those people want to ruin them, as do people like me who are sick and tired of being pushed around by rich assholes with too many lawyers.
And, I am ruining them, bit by bit... Just think what their customers (for their demographics) will say when they find out people have been using scripts to stack the demographics in certain ways and that all of DC's data is essentially worthless?
> Suppose I put notice of an EULA... Where does that leave us?
Right where we started. EULAs are completely unenforcable when not given to you *before* you purchase the product. An EULA *inside* a product is worthless (actually, it's an attempt at fraud, but nobody has yet ben sued.)
Contract law states among other things that you must know about a contract before you can be said to have agreed. Also, once you own a book and the legal right to use it (ditto with software) what can the EULA offer? The same right? If they offer something worthless or don't offer anything, the contract isn't valid.
So if you put an EULA in a book you'd get nothing, except perhaps sued.
> any copyright the sender may have had was voided by [...]
Nope. They hold the copyright, they made a copy, they sent the copy. That's all legit.
Now, you *own* that copy, you can use and abuse it in all the ways that the postal regs permit (and more) because it's yours. But, you don't have the copyright on it, so you can't make more copies. But other than that...
You'd be free to use what you were mailed in any way that didn't conflict with copyright law, trademark law, or patent law (and others in some cases.)
If PepsiCo mailed you a trademark, you'd be able to stick that trademark on something. If they don't like it, tough, they gave it to you for you to use. But that doesn't mean you could reproduce their trademarks and use them. (For instance, I could cut up this free Nike shirt I'm wearing now with the swoosh and 'Running' and put it on a broken truck as a sarcastic comment (ie, not running.) but I couldn't market their trademark.)
If Pfizzer (I think) mailed you the structure of Prozzac, you'd be allowed to make it, if you could. It's selling it afterwords, and products related to making it, that might be covered under patent law. But you could always sell your copy of the email.
If DC sends you a CD with CueCat software on it, you're free to use that, their giving it to you as a gift overrides any EULA they might put on it. You still couldn't burn a bunch of copies, but you could use the one you had in any way you wanted, or sell it.
Nope. Using the software is covered under copyright law. The EULA is unenforcable (unless you're in a state that passed the UCITA).
If I send you a CD, you're free to boot it up, play with it, sell it, etc. It's basically like first-sale, it's yours now, do with it as you like.
You can't break existing laws with it, like sharpen it and kill someone, or burn multiple copies, because murder and copyright laws cover those actions, but you can use it or sell it.
Well, by end-user, I meant someone who buys Quake3 and runs a server, not someone id might pay to do the same, etc.
Pretty well anyone with the bandwidth to run a good server will have a clue about a good machine/OS to run it on.
btw, one of the replies, the one that says "I wish my users were using Linux" has the right idea. A system which is secure enough that it stops them from screwing with it. (yet, ideally, open enough that they can still install software, etc.)
There's a site which uses the embeddable version of IE to do this for you... You point it at a URL and it returns a JPG of what the site looks at in the browser you specify. I didn't bother saving a link because the odd bits of web stuff I do work just fine in lynx, but it could be handy to your web person.
Great! They can match a serial number to an activation code, to a user? And they're going to sell this information to marketing departments? Wonderful!
Ok, I'll make a Javascript popup on my page, (by click only, not an auto-popup) that people with similar tastes in music, books, and products can use to register their support of an item.
Click the button, let the DC webpage load, then kill it. You've just registered one vote for the continued existance of whatever product or service you scanner.
Best yet, after salting the DC database with these false hits, and recording evidence of it, you simply release this evidence to the public (in a slashdot posting and email to a few tech correspondents) and show that DCs demographics are largely false. Nobody will want to buy demographic information that has been tampered with, its value will drop to zero and DC will have nothing.
So we just wait for their privacy policy for change, or for them to start taking people to court. When they do, we ruin them. Until then, we use them to promote products we like without having to actually go and buy multiples of our favorite CDs, etc.
You know, writing the software to sort and arrange the data from supermarket cards would be ammusing. Hmmm, I don't like Brand X because they're affiliated with Brand Evil, so a random percentage of their sales will appear to be from Brand Y instead...
Just do something subtle, pepsi selling less than coke, colgate less than crest, etc.
If you dislike the store, show the brands that don't sell as being high-sellers. If you don't like one of the companies, show their products as not selling, etc.
Show weird combos like tampons and porno mags and tequila always selling together.
I always laugh when I see people paying more just to avoid some little demographics.
I mean, honestly, what do I care that when I buy some groceries they can link that to Herman Munster at 1313 Mockingbird lane, etc?
Just apply for many discount cards and pick a random one. When you've used one almost enough to allow them to come up with a shopper-profile, even if for a fake identity, throw it away and make another.
But, Linux *is* the answer if you're looking for a cheap and stable platform for something you're counting on end-users to run.
Sure, a huge Sun box might be faster and more stable, or WinNT might be more common, but what's the most likely for some geek working in an ISP to use to throw up a server?
Of the OSes and hardware available to the target group for Halo server-ops, Linux on PC hardware is the best available.
(No doubt a *BSD could do it as well, but here I'd aim for the largest of the free OSes first and get users to port to the others, like id did with Quake servers.)
Not at all. The contract implicit in sale is completed the moment the product is sold. To disclose later that the product isn't what you advertised but 'offer an out' is fraud.
You can be held to an original offer even if you later wish to revoke the offer.
If I offer something for sale and tell people to reply to me by Friday, someone can reply saying 'I accept your terms' and that binds me to the sale. I'm then bound to the terms I offered initially.
If I want to offer something vague with undisclosed caveats, I have to say something like 'I have Item X for sale, email me for details if interested' which isn't an offer to sell.
EULAs are completely without any power (except in the states that were bribed to pass the UCITA).
Yup. Having a ramdisk limits the ammount of ram available for caching and caching caches the files actually used, not just the one you specify.
There's one time ramdisks are good... If you have a small set of files (relative to your total ram) that you don't use very often, but when you do, you want them to load with as little delay as possible...
Not really something you'll run into with a webserver where a 10ms lag in HD access will be hidden under at least 50ms of network lag and probably 250ms of rendering lag.
But, if you run a machine who is doing realtime data sampling and you need to run various transforms on the data, you might want to keep some of the essential tools in ram. (Just a contrived example...)
The best way to do this though would be to ask the caching subsystem to keep some, higher priority (specified by you, and by overall usage patterns) in ram even when they might have been dumped, because they're either timing critical, or likely to be used a lot in the future. (The way an ASM programmer could hint to the CPU which branch will be taken by making a seldom taken loop fall-through when skipped and a often-taken loop fall-into when taken.)
People who might be able to hack this should give it a try, to a certain point... Download the watermarked music and an unmarked but otherwise identical sample... This way you can do a bit-for-bit comparrison without having to worry about sampling noise.
Then when they decide on a protection and start releasing music in SDMI, you'll have a jump of writing DeSDMI... Wait just long enough for all the hardware companies to tool up and make SDMI everything, then prove that the format is worthless.
Quite right... Supposedly the XiNG's CSS key has been revoked, it's no longer on the new DVDs. But with that key we cracked the rest of the keys, so we should simply release a page full of DVD keys, forcing them to either admit that CSS can't stop piracy or to recall all existing DVD keys. That'd make all players useless. (I have three myself, two drives, one standalone.) This would be good because they'd *never* convince people to buy a new type of drive every year or two just to help them keep us region locked. They'd have to stop releasing movies, admit defeat and use a compromised CSS key, or use an unprotected format.)
They are just doing this for a ploy. Here's the proof. (A quote from their click-through agreement.)
(1) you will not be permitted to disclose any information about the details of the attack to any other party,
All they plan on doing is buying the silence of people who manage to hack it, such that they can sue them if they ever speak out about it. This way they don't have to fix anything, just claim that the bug could never be exploited again. And because the person who found it has signed a contract with them, they can't tell everyone that SDMI is the same lame format as before but XORed with 68 instead of 67, or something stupid. (To use a CueCat example.)
And SDMI is inherently evil. This isn't one company selling music in a restricted way and hoping that the lower prices this allows will encourage people to use the restricted media, this is a conglomerate wanting to restrict people's ability to ever use any other format, and using their power to ensure that only they (or licensed companies) ever sell music or music devices, and not for reduced prices, we've never seen a monopoly with rock-bottom prices... no doubt music will get more expensive to cover the processor time to encrypt it, or something stupid.
These are the same people who bribed politicians to pass laws like the DMCA that make it illegal to get around their (previously illegal) price fixing technology. (The region locking.) Not to mention the fact that playback (not even piracy, which I could understand) on unlicensed players is, in their view, completely illegal. Which is no big deal except that they've proven they can buy judges.
Here's a quote from their click-through license agreement.
(1) you will not be permitted to disclose any information about the details of the attack to any other party,
They're just going to buy the silence of everyone who does, then they'll be able to say that the hole they discovered is closed (because everyone who could exploit it has and has been payed off). Worse than that though, it'll enable them to sue these people for breach of contract for ever talking about anything related to digital music, encryption, watermarking, or anything else they they take offense to. Kiss your right to participate in Slashdot discussions goodbye, unless of course you're prepared to toe the SDMI-party line.
The RIAA and MPAA are all cheats, thieves and liars. Bah, why do they bother, their usual method of bribing all the politicians and judges has carried them this far.
If you try to determine what percentage of people like science fiction by polling outside of a Star Wars premiere, you'll get biased results.
If you poll for opinions about black equality outside a KKK rally, you'll get biased results.
Those are very obvious, the completely biased results make this easy for everyone to understand.
Now, if you said "It's like polling about BeOS outside of a Amiga user's group" that wouldn't mean anything to most people, though hardcore Amiga users are probably fairly biased towards various other OSes, both for and against...
The difference is that this isn't as obvious to outsiders. Not everyone know's what an Amiga user would feel about BeOS or other OSes. Everyone knows that Star Wars fans are fanatical (esp the ones who go to crowded opening-night movies), just like everyone knows that KKK members are fanatical.
Perhaps saying "Like asking a poll about best economic system at the end of Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_" would be just as accurate, but few people have heard of Adam Smith and _Wealth of Nations_ compared to the number who have heard of Adolph Hitler and _Mein Kampf_.
You may not like anything Nazi related, but it's perfectly valid to talk about.
Being that the talk was about polling and ways polls can be biased, discussing asking leading questions to fanatical people is on topic. Readers of _Mein Kampf_ are likely to be somewhat fanatical and thus it's a fair comparison.
Q: Will staring into the:CueCat hurt my eyes like a laser pointer?
A: No.:CueCat uses LEDs for scanning. It poses no risk to your eyes.
I just posted this in response to what might be a joke because a friend asked me this same question... Most good barcode scanners use a small laser so they have a better range and can scan in more adverse conditions, the CueCat though is cheap, so cheap you don't have to worry about this.
That's not paranoid at all, that just makes sense... They're sending a product that only has value to them if it can be tied to a person, no doubt they did their best to do so.
But, the scanner doesn't communicate back unless you use their software and this guy didn't install the software so they'll never see the serial number from his CueCat, let alone be able to match it to an ID.
More than that even... If I'm in a mall and someone asks if I want them to send me a free sample of something in the mail, that free sample is a gift even though I asked for it...
Basically, unless you've already entered into an agreement with a company (like Columbia House, etc) to send you something in return for payment (even if at a later date), you can consider it a gift and keep it, even if they show up at the door asking for it.
There are a couple exceptions to this, for instance if they mail something to the wrong John Smith, or if they mail you something you said you wanted and they told you they'd bill you for it (at the same time as you asked for it.)
The presense of a ROM code in hardware doesn't matter at all. If the company selling your old (completely analog in this assumption) fridge wanted to, they could make you sign a contract before buying the fridge which would prevent you from storing certain things in it...
They couldn't prevent you from storing grocieries from a certain store, that would be anti-competitive, but they could prevent you from storing beer, or peanut butter (maybe they're afraid of shotgun lawsuits from allergic people.)
It doesn't matter what sort of parts the fridge uses. Hell, they could sell you a cardboard box and if you signed the contract before sale, you'd be bound by the same rules...
But, if they don't show you the 'agreement' before you purchase the product it has *no legal force!*
If anyone claims that EULAs have any legal force (outside of the bonehead states that accepted bribes to pass the UCITA) they're lying. It's painfully obvious to anyone with any legal background that EULAs do not satisfy the requirements for a contract, they fall short in many different areas.
There's an off chance an EULA would be binding in the case of free software, but I doubt it. It's like an EULA for a book... If you buy it, you can read it, if they give it away, you can read it.
Well, you *do* own that copy of the software and can do anything with it that you legally could do with a book... You can sell it, use it, modify it, ignore it, critique it, benchmark it, burn it, or feed it to a cyber-pet.
You can't bypass copyright controls and start reselling the AOL software (plural), but you may resell your copy of the AOL software.
Ditto with the CueCat. You own it in all concievable ways, but that doesn't mean you own the patents it's based on, or the copyright on any ROM code. But you do own the right to use everything that it comes with.
You might want to ask a lawyer from your college, but Microsoft is on very shaky ground when they demand you have proper LICENSES... They can demand you have enough legit copies for all your machines, but being that it's all the same thing and if you buy fifty CDs, it's fifty identical copies, they can't claim that they're trying to sell a different version for each one, they hurt their case a bit.
Basically, this whole license bullshit has never been tested in court, Microsoft is just looking to bully people.
As long as you own Windows NT, install Windows NT. If they try to sell it to you again, decline.
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Why shouldn't we annoy them out of existance? If it was in my power, I'd shut them down right now.
They threatened legal action against people doing perfectly legal things. That's basically the same as me threatening to break the legs of a toddler who pissed me off.
They're using their large cash reserves to intimidate. The threat is that they'll sue you into the stone ages and take everything you have with huge damage judgements.
Well, fair is fair... they want to ruin people who don't do what they want, those people want to ruin them, as do people like me who are sick and tired of being pushed around by rich assholes with too many lawyers.
And, I am ruining them, bit by bit... Just think what their customers (for their demographics) will say when they find out people have been using scripts to stack the demographics in certain ways and that all of DC's data is essentially worthless?
> Suppose I put notice of an EULA ... Where does that leave us?
Right where we started. EULAs are completely unenforcable when not given to you *before* you purchase the product. An EULA *inside* a product is worthless (actually, it's an attempt at fraud, but nobody has yet ben sued.)
Contract law states among other things that you must know about a contract before you can be said to have agreed. Also, once you own a book and the legal right to use it (ditto with software) what can the EULA offer? The same right? If they offer something worthless or don't offer anything, the contract isn't valid.
So if you put an EULA in a book you'd get nothing, except perhaps sued.
> any copyright the sender may have had was voided by [...]
Nope. They hold the copyright, they made a copy, they sent the copy. That's all legit.
Now, you *own* that copy, you can use and abuse it in all the ways that the postal regs permit (and more) because it's yours. But, you don't have the copyright on it, so you can't make more copies. But other than that...
You'd be free to use what you were mailed in any way that didn't conflict with copyright law, trademark law, or patent law (and others in some cases.)
If PepsiCo mailed you a trademark, you'd be able to stick that trademark on something. If they don't like it, tough, they gave it to you for you to use. But that doesn't mean you could reproduce their trademarks and use them. (For instance, I could cut up this free Nike shirt I'm wearing now with the swoosh and 'Running' and put it on a broken truck as a sarcastic comment (ie, not running.) but I couldn't market their trademark.)
If Pfizzer (I think) mailed you the structure of Prozzac, you'd be allowed to make it, if you could. It's selling it afterwords, and products related to making it, that might be covered under patent law. But you could always sell your copy of the email.
If DC sends you a CD with CueCat software on it, you're free to use that, their giving it to you as a gift overrides any EULA they might put on it. You still couldn't burn a bunch of copies, but you could use the one you had in any way you wanted, or sell it.
Nope. Using the software is covered under copyright law. The EULA is unenforcable (unless you're in a state that passed the UCITA).
If I send you a CD, you're free to boot it up, play with it, sell it, etc. It's basically like first-sale, it's yours now, do with it as you like.
You can't break existing laws with it, like sharpen it and kill someone, or burn multiple copies, because murder and copyright laws cover those actions, but you can use it or sell it.
Well, by end-user, I meant someone who buys Quake3 and runs a server, not someone id might pay to do the same, etc.
Pretty well anyone with the bandwidth to run a good server will have a clue about a good machine/OS to run it on.
btw, one of the replies, the one that says "I wish my users were using Linux" has the right idea. A system which is secure enough that it stops them from screwing with it. (yet, ideally, open enough that they can still install software, etc.)
There's a site which uses the embeddable version of IE to do this for you... You point it at a URL and it returns a JPG of what the site looks at in the browser you specify. I didn't bother saving a link because the odd bits of web stuff I do work just fine in lynx, but it could be handy to your web person.
Great! They can match a serial number to an activation code, to a user? And they're going to sell this information to marketing departments? Wonderful!
Ok, I'll make a Javascript popup on my page, (by click only, not an auto-popup) that people with similar tastes in music, books, and products can use to register their support of an item.
Click the button, let the DC webpage load, then kill it. You've just registered one vote for the continued existance of whatever product or service you scanner.
Best yet, after salting the DC database with these false hits, and recording evidence of it, you simply release this evidence to the public (in a slashdot posting and email to a few tech correspondents) and show that DCs demographics are largely false. Nobody will want to buy demographic information that has been tampered with, its value will drop to zero and DC will have nothing.
So we just wait for their privacy policy for change, or for them to start taking people to court. When they do, we ruin them. Until then, we use them to promote products we like without having to actually go and buy multiples of our favorite CDs, etc.
Chuckle.
You know, writing the software to sort and arrange the data from supermarket cards would be ammusing. Hmmm, I don't like Brand X because they're affiliated with Brand Evil, so a random percentage of their sales will appear to be from Brand Y instead...
Just do something subtle, pepsi selling less than coke, colgate less than crest, etc.
If you dislike the store, show the brands that don't sell as being high-sellers. If you don't like one of the companies, show their products as not selling, etc.
Show weird combos like tampons and porno mags and tequila always selling together.
So? Find a crack.
They're perfectly legal and make life easier.
I crack *all* my software. Even the annoying stuff like Q3 that has a serial number, well at least I don't have to have the CD in the drive as well.
I always laugh when I see people paying more just to avoid some little demographics.
I mean, honestly, what do I care that when I buy some groceries they can link that to Herman Munster at 1313 Mockingbird lane, etc?
Just apply for many discount cards and pick a random one. When you've used one almost enough to allow them to come up with a shopper-profile, even if for a fake identity, throw it away and make another.
What is it gaining access to?
The DMCA is the DM-Copyright-A, if a copyright violation is not occuring or about to occur, it's likely the DMCA isn't involved.
Yes, the DMCA is a festering example of bribe money and buying corrupt judges, but that doesn't mean it's accurate here.
(Corrupt judges? Kaplan was bought and paid for.)
But, Linux *is* the answer if you're looking for a cheap and stable platform for something you're counting on end-users to run.
Sure, a huge Sun box might be faster and more stable, or WinNT might be more common, but what's the most likely for some geek working in an ISP to use to throw up a server?
Of the OSes and hardware available to the target group for Halo server-ops, Linux on PC hardware is the best available.
(No doubt a *BSD could do it as well, but here I'd aim for the largest of the free OSes first and get users to port to the others, like id did with Quake servers.)
Not at all. The contract implicit in sale is completed the moment the product is sold. To disclose later that the product isn't what you advertised but 'offer an out' is fraud.
You can be held to an original offer even if you later wish to revoke the offer.
If I offer something for sale and tell people to reply to me by Friday, someone can reply saying 'I accept your terms' and that binds me to the sale. I'm then bound to the terms I offered initially.
If I want to offer something vague with undisclosed caveats, I have to say something like 'I have Item X for sale, email me for details if interested' which isn't an offer to sell.
EULAs are completely without any power (except in the states that were bribed to pass the UCITA).
Yup. Having a ramdisk limits the ammount of ram available for caching and caching caches the files actually used, not just the one you specify.
There's one time ramdisks are good... If you have a small set of files (relative to your total ram) that you don't use very often, but when you do, you want them to load with as little delay as possible...
Not really something you'll run into with a webserver where a 10ms lag in HD access will be hidden under at least 50ms of network lag and probably 250ms of rendering lag.
But, if you run a machine who is doing realtime data sampling and you need to run various transforms on the data, you might want to keep some of the essential tools in ram. (Just a contrived example...)
The best way to do this though would be to ask the caching subsystem to keep some, higher priority (specified by you, and by overall usage patterns) in ram even when they might have been dumped, because they're either timing critical, or likely to be used a lot in the future. (The way an ASM programmer could hint to the CPU which branch will be taken by making a seldom taken loop fall-through when skipped and a often-taken loop fall-into when taken.)
People who might be able to hack this should give it a try, to a certain point... Download the watermarked music and an unmarked but otherwise identical sample... This way you can do a bit-for-bit comparrison without having to worry about sampling noise.
Then when they decide on a protection and start releasing music in SDMI, you'll have a jump of writing DeSDMI... Wait just long enough for all the hardware companies to tool up and make SDMI everything, then prove that the format is worthless.
Quite right... Supposedly the XiNG's CSS key has been revoked, it's no longer on the new DVDs. But with that key we cracked the rest of the keys, so we should simply release a page full of DVD keys, forcing them to either admit that CSS can't stop piracy or to recall all existing DVD keys. That'd make all players useless. (I have three myself, two drives, one standalone.) This would be good because they'd *never* convince people to buy a new type of drive every year or two just to help them keep us region locked. They'd have to stop releasing movies, admit defeat and use a compromised CSS key, or use an unprotected format.)
They are just doing this for a ploy. Here's the proof. (A quote from their click-through agreement.)
(1) you will not be permitted to disclose any information about the details of the attack to any other party,
All they plan on doing is buying the silence of people who manage to hack it, such that they can sue them if they ever speak out about it. This way they don't have to fix anything, just claim that the bug could never be exploited again. And because the person who found it has signed a contract with them, they can't tell everyone that SDMI is the same lame format as before but XORed with 68 instead of 67, or something stupid. (To use a CueCat example.)
And SDMI is inherently evil. This isn't one company selling music in a restricted way and hoping that the lower prices this allows will encourage people to use the restricted media, this is a conglomerate wanting to restrict people's ability to ever use any other format, and using their power to ensure that only they (or licensed companies) ever sell music or music devices, and not for reduced prices, we've never seen a monopoly with rock-bottom prices... no doubt music will get more expensive to cover the processor time to encrypt it, or something stupid.
These are the same people who bribed politicians to pass laws like the DMCA that make it illegal to get around their (previously illegal) price fixing technology. (The region locking.) Not to mention the fact that playback (not even piracy, which I could understand) on unlicensed players is, in their view, completely illegal. Which is no big deal except that they've proven they can buy judges.
Here's a quote from their click-through license agreement.
(1) you will not be permitted to disclose any information about the details of the attack to any other party,
They're just going to buy the silence of everyone who does, then they'll be able to say that the hole they discovered is closed (because everyone who could exploit it has and has been payed off). Worse than that though, it'll enable them to sue these people for breach of contract for ever talking about anything related to digital music, encryption, watermarking, or anything else they they take offense to. Kiss your right to participate in Slashdot discussions goodbye, unless of course you're prepared to toe the SDMI-party line.
The RIAA and MPAA are all cheats, thieves and liars. Bah, why do they bother, their usual method of bribing all the politicians and judges has carried them this far.
The comment was incredibly appropriate.
If you try to determine what percentage of people like science fiction by polling outside of a Star Wars premiere, you'll get biased results.
If you poll for opinions about black equality outside a KKK rally, you'll get biased results.
Those are very obvious, the completely biased results make this easy for everyone to understand.
Now, if you said "It's like polling about BeOS outside of a Amiga user's group" that wouldn't mean anything to most people, though hardcore Amiga users are probably fairly biased towards various other OSes, both for and against...
The difference is that this isn't as obvious to outsiders. Not everyone know's what an Amiga user would feel about BeOS or other OSes. Everyone knows that Star Wars fans are fanatical (esp the ones who go to crowded opening-night movies), just like everyone knows that KKK members are fanatical.
Perhaps saying "Like asking a poll about best economic system at the end of Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_" would be just as accurate, but few people have heard of Adam Smith and _Wealth of Nations_ compared to the number who have heard of Adolph Hitler and _Mein Kampf_.
You may not like anything Nazi related, but it's perfectly valid to talk about.
Being that the talk was about polling and ways polls can be biased, discussing asking leading questions to fanatical people is on topic. Readers of _Mein Kampf_ are likely to be somewhat fanatical and thus it's a fair comparison.
From the CC FAQ...
:CueCat hurt my eyes like a laser pointer?
:CueCat uses LEDs for scanning. It poses no risk to your eyes.
Q: Will staring into the
A: No.
I just posted this in response to what might be a joke because a friend asked me this same question... Most good barcode scanners use a small laser so they have a better range and can scan in more adverse conditions, the CueCat though is cheap, so cheap you don't have to worry about this.
That's not paranoid at all, that just makes sense... They're sending a product that only has value to them if it can be tied to a person, no doubt they did their best to do so.
But, the scanner doesn't communicate back unless you use their software and this guy didn't install the software so they'll never see the serial number from his CueCat, let alone be able to match it to an ID.
More than that even... If I'm in a mall and someone asks if I want them to send me a free sample of something in the mail, that free sample is a gift even though I asked for it...
Basically, unless you've already entered into an agreement with a company (like Columbia House, etc) to send you something in return for payment (even if at a later date), you can consider it a gift and keep it, even if they show up at the door asking for it.
There are a couple exceptions to this, for instance if they mail something to the wrong John Smith, or if they mail you something you said you wanted and they told you they'd bill you for it (at the same time as you asked for it.)
The presense of a ROM code in hardware doesn't matter at all. If the company selling your old (completely analog in this assumption) fridge wanted to, they could make you sign a contract before buying the fridge which would prevent you from storing certain things in it...
They couldn't prevent you from storing grocieries from a certain store, that would be anti-competitive, but they could prevent you from storing beer, or peanut butter (maybe they're afraid of shotgun lawsuits from allergic people.)
It doesn't matter what sort of parts the fridge uses. Hell, they could sell you a cardboard box and if you signed the contract before sale, you'd be bound by the same rules...
But, if they don't show you the 'agreement' before you purchase the product it has *no legal force!*
If anyone claims that EULAs have any legal force (outside of the bonehead states that accepted bribes to pass the UCITA) they're lying. It's painfully obvious to anyone with any legal background that EULAs do not satisfy the requirements for a contract, they fall short in many different areas.
There's an off chance an EULA would be binding in the case of free software, but I doubt it. It's like an EULA for a book... If you buy it, you can read it, if they give it away, you can read it.
Well, you *do* own that copy of the software and can do anything with it that you legally could do with a book... You can sell it, use it, modify it, ignore it, critique it, benchmark it, burn it, or feed it to a cyber-pet.
You can't bypass copyright controls and start reselling the AOL software (plural), but you may resell your copy of the AOL software.
Ditto with the CueCat. You own it in all concievable ways, but that doesn't mean you own the patents it's based on, or the copyright on any ROM code. But you do own the right to use everything that it comes with.
You might want to ask a lawyer from your college, but Microsoft is on very shaky ground when they demand you have proper LICENSES... They can demand you have enough legit copies for all your machines, but being that it's all the same thing and if you buy fifty CDs, it's fifty identical copies, they can't claim that they're trying to sell a different version for each one, they hurt their case a bit.
Basically, this whole license bullshit has never been tested in court, Microsoft is just looking to bully people.
As long as you own Windows NT, install Windows NT. If they try to sell it to you again, decline.