I'm that original poster who said that religion is a joke. What I asserted is that while opinions cannot be disproved, religious claims aren't opinion, they're incorrect fact.
You can play semantic games with my word 'fact', but it's correct to say that I'm typing this message at a keyboard. I can't prove I'm not a brain in a jar in some universal simulator, but unless I am, this is a keyboard... Gravity is a theory, that things fall 'down' is fact. Down is the direction that things fall when dropped - by definition, that things fall when dropped is a fact despite that we have no final knowledge about the mechanism involved. This is what I'm calling a fact.
In this sense, facts can be proved. In fact, many are self-evident because they are a tautology. Things fall down. It's not possible to conclusively demonstrate a negative, such as the lack of white ravens, but that's not the issue here.
Religious claims talk about facts, but are incorrect. I can't disprove you saying 'the concept of god makes me feel fuzzy', it very well might. But if you say 'moses parted the sea, jesus rose from the dead, god created the universe' these are factual claims which can be disproved easily.
Consider that I can disprove your claim not only by showing it to be false, but by showing it to be based on incorrect or faulty reasoning and incapable of being right except by luck. At this point, god is as likely a the flying spaghetti monster.
I'm not saying that no god-like entity exists, just that you don't have the slightest bit of evidence. You're wrong about anything you claim without possible proof, regardless of (untestable) reality.
The nature of religion is to make implausible and untestable claims on the reasoning that they can't actually be proved wrong absolutely and thus that those ideas are as valid as ones made by people who actually understand the issue.
How does it take faith to refuse to believe anything until you see proof?
I guess you could say that I believe it's a bad idea to blindly trust things. Only a religious person could equate examining things for yourself with blind faith.
Not people of any faith, people of any faith who open their mouths and let their faith be known. They're like racists, or idiots who don't know we're fighting a war with their tax dollars. Stupid enough to need to be called on it.
If you still believe in sky fairies you probably believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, Speed Racer, Peter Pan, and all manner of fiction. Or if not, your rationale for choosing one over the other should be amusing. The world isn't for children. If you do believe any of these things you'd better hope that someone cares enough for you to make you feel bad by insulting your faith and wakes you up to reality.
Talking to invisible friends is textbook insanity. Believing god will help you is as damaging as believing homeopathic remedies work, that there's a system for winning the lottery, or that raping children cures aids. All of those ideas have been proven to be wrong, and yet have destroyed families and killed people. Why subscribe to any of them?
Yes, I do generalize all people of faith to be like the KKK - they take the religious orders to be more important than what they see or feel for themselves. They have a higher purpose that can motivate them to do anything in this world, however horrid or dangerous. They abdicate all responsibility for their actions. To fully godwin, they act just like the nazis who were following orders.
Maybe not all religious people are suicide bombers or holy warriors, but that's only because they didn't get a religion that preached that - they certainly aren't exercising critical thinking skills and choosing their own actions or they would be religious. Have whatever philosophy you wish, but when it crosses the line to invisible friends it crosses the line to insanity.
To be religious is pretty much synonymous with not being responsible your own actions.
Sure, you can't disprove a statement that says nothing. Or really even one that states an opinion.
But if a religion does claim something such as Moses parting the sea, then it's in the realm of facts, even if only purportedly, and should be examined as a totally unsupported and counterfactual story (ie, wrong.)
What biblical scholars think is irrelevant. It's what the majority of believers believe that matters. And frankly, unless the OT was prefixed with 'this is just for reference - do not follow' I think it's fairly obvious that it was intended to apply.
Don't forget, the book is supposed to be divinely inspired by god himself. I find it doubtful that he'd be sloppy in this regard... Really any flaws in it at all disprove huge swathes of contemporary christian doctrine. It's taught as truth in church schools that the King James bible translation was guided by god, through the hands of monks who prayed over each word.
What some biblical scholar can weasel out of is far different than what the average believer is raised to believe.
Of course it's obvious from reading the books that both testaments are very different. One is, to borrow a phrase, fire and brimstone, and the other not. I do believe what you say, that scholars make these distinctions. And I even believe they're being truthful. But if it's divinely inspired there shouldn't be any mistakes. If you believe it's divinely inspired you shouldn't dare judge the value of it, that one book is more right than another.
Definition: "Bigot is often used as a pejorative term against a person who is obstinately devoted to prejudices even when these views are challenged or proven to be false or not universally applicable or acceptable."
Challenge the belief that all religion is false. Until then, the belief that it is a joke does seem universally acceptable.
Religious people think that because crazy opinions are everywhere (for instance, that Adam Sandler is funny) that their crazy ideas must be just the same, and accepted as valid alternatives. Not at all. Religious people assert fact - that their god exists and their holy book is right. You can't disprove that Adam Sandler is funny because humor is subjective. You can disprove any religious assertions made, because they aren't opinion. They're incorrect fact.
Anyways. Insulting religious people is good. They're stupid and need to be made to realize it, if only so that they slink away from society and don't try to poison more minds with their trash. It's like insulting people who spout KKK filth - cut and belittle them and their opinions until they're ashamed of how people make them feel. The correct answer to "Black are subhuman" isn't "Oh I can see how you might think that, but really...", it's "You're an idiot - just fucking stupid." Ditto for 'My god lived, then died, then was reborn, for your right to eat shellfish which is no-longer bad!"
If the person drops the beliefs, they might not be a permanent waste of skin. Until then, they're just lying to you about their sky fairies, or the inferiority of the black man, etc.
If someone persists in believing something obviously wrong you should think less of them. They're either stupid, insane, or lying. None of which is a desirable quality.
The OLPC is made to teach people to program. If kids learn that they'll grow up to program too. Not just on the OLPC, but on any computer they care to sit at.
If we give them a windows computer they'll end up like the 99.98% of users - totally incapable of writing a batch file or scheduling anything to run at a given time.
If we give them a computer where the UI, games, and other programs are written in python (which is available and easy to edit) we can't help but produce children with a far deeper understanding than if we shove their face into Windows and they can't program without downloading 400+ MBs of Visual Studio and accepting a ton of licenses along the way.
People talk about MS office apps, as if any semi-bright child is going to take longer than 30m to learn any of them. The concepts are easy, you write text and after selecting it, select options to change how it looks.
Databases and spreadsheets are trivial to anyone who programs
Giving these kids Apple2s with 1988 software would be better than giving them crippled Windows machines that won't run real software, aren't quite like real MS Windows, are locked down, slow, and unprogrammable. Yeah, that'll help because years of using that substandard machine/OS will substitute for a quick tutorial in MS business apps. Of course it won't teach them anything else in those years, other than maybe how to protect WIndows using a virus scanner, or more likely, having their windows computer trojaned and sending spam endlessly.
You're convinced we need more low-skilled users? I can find you any number of idiots who can run MS Word and can't run a dishwasher. I think we want to encourage programmers and scientists, not idiot wage slaves.
The game of marbles, is it gambling? You buy pieces (giving them a real-world value) and stake them on the outcome of a game.
It's the same online. You buy an account, and perhaps currency (WoW gold, L$, etc) for your character, and your character's equipment. This is directly analogous to your marble bag.
If you PvP (kill another character), it's in game, not real murder. So obviously if my thief character, steals from your character it's not real theft anymore than your killing of my character in retribution is real murder. Marbles trade hands, but we both put them into play and that's how the game works.
If our decision makers were veiled, that might apply. As I know where I ended up, as do they, and don't think I'll be born again, your application of the theory to the real world holds little weight.
Obviously he's right, if we were charged with picking the best society for ourselves to be thrown into randomly, we'd pick a nicer one for everyone than we make after knowing our own position.
But what application does that have to how society did develop? Except perhaps in areas believing in reincarnation, this should have had little effect as those who could do something had little reason to do so, as it obviously had nothing to do with them (having already being born).
That's because people assume they've got to make some huge switch from one language to another, using the new one for everything.
Any C/C++/Java shop could do itself a huge favor by using to Ruby/Python/Perl for lighter tasks, prototyping etc. If you don't have a library for something, don't try to write that thing in that language. If you do, pick the easiest language for the problem.
Any real coders (as opposed to those who tinker at an existing app but never write new code) are going to be trying new tools all the time. That already blows the 100% consistency that people are trying for anyways. When you've got to learn a new build tool, why not also learn a new language that fits another niche you're working on?
Horses for courses. Don't prototype your new website in C++, don't code your memory manager in Ruby. If you do more than one thing, you'll need more than one tool.
Not really, but neither is a market ruled by MS or Walmart, which was my point. By status quo who do you mean our system of trying to prevent monopoly abuses (AT&T, MS trial), or our system of mostly ignoring Walmart, MS, etc until they truly are monopolies?
If a monopoly is good, well then, our monopoly decided that theirs is out of business. If that's not good, then they'll agree we need rules to control monopoly powers.
Bull. If any religion were even remotely true at least one person could just ask for a miracle while someone documented it. The bible says that miracles happen, so where are they?
It's impossible to *prove* that a god doesn't exist, as I'm sure you're aware. It's trivial however, to prove that one exists, if it does. All we'd have to do is have one miracle performed while we watch. Make the moon vanish temporarily and have the tides change appropriately, give Jupiter rings, turn the sky red across the whole world, speak to everyone at once, all would be adequate proof.
Hundreds of religions, thousands of years, and so very little evidence.
Psst. The emperor's new clothes... they aren't really as good as he thinks.
It's not a government cracking down on a monopoly, it's another monopoly, of road and bridge owners called the public. They're making a strategic decision to not allow you to use their resources and legal benefits (incorporation, etc) if you're pursuing a business course hostile to theirs.
In other words, we own the other 99.9999% of the world that your monopoly (in area X) does not. We act vindictively to those who bite our hands by trying to single-source important parts and screw with price.
Doesn't seem like something a free market monopolist should have a problem with. It's nowhere near as bad as how Walmart treats its suppliers...
It's not like I can walk in, flash my stock certificates, and ask to check out their operations with a hope to find any problems.
Why not? And before buying too. I can't imagine how they expect people to buy before knowing that. They are trying to sell stock...
Would you buy a share of a partnership without investigating further?
if the average rate for stores violating labor laws are.1%, you'd still expect Walmart to have dozens of offending stores each year.
It could be hundreds. No big deal. It's in how you resolve the problem. If they look for these occurances, promptly report the problem, deal with the person, and try to find a way to keep it from happening again (or find out sooner next time) and actually seem to be discouraging it, then that's great. However, if they have a culture of brushing it under the carpet, shame on them and I think they should be shut down. Fool me 9,342 times this month...
The company that runs the mutual fund doesn't actually own the stock, they're merely holding it for me.
That's not usual, is it. I've seen gold that is allocated - if they go broke, bar #357453 in the vault is yours. But I haven't seen it with Mutual funds, I thought they were all pooled.
As far as stock ownership goes, do you feel responsible for the actions of a stock you hold in a mutual fund? directly?
If your mutual fund picked up SCO stock in 2005, would you have been okay funding their actions? Would you be opposed at holding MS stock when they're paying SCO through an intermediary?
I think with ads the advertiser will always have choice, because they'll merely have to beat the market rate for the spot they want. As it costs fairly little to host a small business, there likely will be ad servers willing to host them for a price.
I think the real threat would be from the information that they could collect. All searches, ads on sites you didn't search to find, and handling the financials for much of the web's smaller e-commerce. They'd be a little NSA.
They could end up monopolizing a lot of commodity selling too. What does Amazon have? A search engine, with user comments, that sells stuff. Google could hack that together in an hour. If they wanted they'd put everyone else (who didn't add value) out of business.
But, at that, as long as they didn't try to close the market to others (restrictive deals with Fedex, etc) it really wouldn't be a problem. Inefficient access to commodities is simply a phase we're moving out of. It'll be very low margin eventually, but if they want it, I don't see why a market shared between Amazon and Walmart would be better than one dominated by Google.
Well, there's also the secret hope that if they did monopolize the market, they'd put a bunch of ad people out of work, and maybe reduce the amount of visual clutter. They seem to understand when less is more.
I didn't mean that as if guns were a bad thing, but that if you bought corporate stock you might be surprised when you ended up buying guns for some rebel army. (Mark Thatcher?)
I'm not proposing a second check as much as checking for yourself. I wouldn't trust an old home inspection report from the seller, and I wouldn't trust independent auditors hired by the people I didn't trust.
I'm not advocating a special type of stockholder liability, just advocating that the same principle that makes a CEO responsible for the actions of his underlings also makes the owner (even when this is a group of people) responsible for the CEO and on down, etc. And only as responsible as would be reasonable for the lack of attention. If it was unavoidable, less responsibility. If however, you financed a criminal enterprise for a few years because you didn't want to really know, it seems your liability should be unlimited.
Take two identical companies. The one that skimps on QA, hires dumb researchers who can't find a cigarette->cancer link, etc, is going to be the most profitable. They'll be spending less to do business, doing more business, and not cutting off profitable products because of potential problems. The same goes for hiring the worst auditors you can. They cost less and still fulfill legal obligations. If there's no individual liability for an owner, the less careful company is a lot better buy. It'll make far more money, longer, and if caught, punishes you no further than the stockholders of the companies yours bounced checks to as it died.
Really, the idea of limited liability doesn't sit well with my libertarian side. The potential damages to a victim are unlimited, so why should the liability in the accident be different? Why should there be total responsibility for one person, but no responsibility for many?
I don't see how your idea of preventing corporate stock ownership is much better, or much less damaging to the economy. It makes the trail shorter, but if owning stock doesn't confer any risk, why bother? I think not being able to purchase stock with corporate funds would really slow down the market. Mutual funds are this, and in general, don't seem like too bad of a thing. (Except that they make people feel distant and thus not care about the actions done on their dollar.)
I still think risk should go to stockholders, perhaps companies who have stockholders of their own. Eventually you reach individuals. It seems to cover the problems of corporate stock ownership by making sure that the consequences aren't negated, just divided again.
I'm not expecting everyone foot the entire bill for Arthur Andersen for a year. But if you want to invest in a company perhaps you should find other potential shareholders to investigate it with you. Especially with the net, it should be fairly easy to arrange. If the company itself is paying for an 'independent' audit, perhaps it's not so independent... That's why I think Enron is a good example.
It would eat into profits, but so do laws in general. So does general due diligence.
And yes, I do think it should extend to mutual funds. That's what mutual-fund companies are for, but investors should be investigating to see that they do a good job.
If you have $100 to invest, perhaps you have $10 to invest to make sure the other $90 isn't going to go to buying guns, or whatever.
If I buy a TV it's my responsibility to make sure it's not stolen. In simple cases where I could hardly have known it'd simply be given back to the original owner. In cases where I'd bought it off the back of a truck, repeatedly, I'd be charged with receiving stolen goods, conspiracy, etc. When due diligence is done I stand to lose my TV money. When it's not, I could lose far more including my freedom.
Why does buying a TV from a purported company come with far more risk than investing in the company and buying a TV with those funds?
In fact, it seems far easier for the potential stockholder to ask where the TVs come from and get a real answer than for a customer.
As for crimes being discovered... Microsoft intentionally claimed that removing IE from Windows would slow it down. They produced a video which showed this. It turned out that the video was faked. Microsoft claimed that this was a mistake, something done by a low-level employee. They had claimed it for months, had a VP testify to it, and it was the mistake of a low-level employee? Had I faked evidence in a federal trial I'd still be suffering. Microsoft can use the excuse 'we're too big to totally watch' and as long as the top people didn't provably intend it, we don't punish them. As for SCO, they intentionally lied in many cases. And Microsoft indirectly funneled them a lot of money. But because of how if a company does it, it's fine, neither of them are looking at losing anything more than their original investment, despite costing that much from their targets, and potentially having ruined their competitors totally. If SCO or any members are convicted of crimes, shouldn't this go back up the chain of funding to Microsoft? (or, to individual stockholders who can't be bothered to investigate.)
There's a lot higher payoff there for a successful crime than simply losing your funds.
And there's a fairly poor record of companies being punished at all for this. If I filed a fake DMCA takedown I'd be criminally charged for lying, sued for slander, etc. A RIAA company does 50 knowingly less-than-sure takedowns a day. If they wanted to be sure, they'd investigate, but that'd cost too much so they file fraudulent federal paperwork. Punishment? None. Revocation the right to file takedowns? Hell no!
Many companies seem to use their vast size as an excuse for their behavior. I think it's a reason to break them up for scrap and sell them to new owners who promise to follow societies laws.
And yes, if I continually committed crimes such that my parents should have known, and benefited from them, yes I think they should be charged too. If living off the avails of prostitution is a crime, so should living off the avails of a knowingly illegal business opportunity, or willful ignorance to avoid knowing.
In my last post I said that if companies better policed themselves for any and all crime, they'd have a better shot at saying the company itself didn't commit them. One broken law is the employee, one a day that the company benefits from is the company's resposibility even if everyone is technically innocent.
I don't dislike businesses or investors. Really. I simply wish that everyone were held to the same standard.
To program in for fun, yes. To do things you'd never have thought of doing, yes.
Blocks and iterators: [1,2,3].collect {|x| x ** 3 }.each {|x| puts x.to_i }
It's like specifying arguments that contain code. Functions you otherwise would have to pass a ton of arguments to, or provide a call-back function for, take an anonymous block.
Ruby's a very quick language. You can get something done quickly like Perl, and it has nice shortcuts like "foobar" =~/Foo/i for regexps, etc.
If you dislike modifying built-in classes, class Array ; def to_s ; #new behavior ; super ; end ; end then you might not like Ruby.
If you want type checking, you might not like Ruby. Or, you might like duck-typing (obj.respond_to?:desired_method and then treat the object like it's what you want regardless of which actual class it is).
If you like to program, give it a try. If it's just a work thing, as someone else said, stick with what works for you.
1) Depends on what you're writing. big_array.collect {|x| x.expensive_file_io }.sort_by {|x| x.to_s } is going to be stuck in library code far more than interpreting Ruby.
2) Granted. Yet the Ruby community seems more cohesive than other languages. JRuby and Rubinius are intentionally staying close to Ruby. Of course, in JRuby, much of what you do wouldn't work without the J, so it's not back-portable, but technically would be.
3) See 1. A ruby process only wastes the time interpreting and garbage collecting that you design it to. IPC does take longer than inter-thread, but most server type projects I've written in Ruby are meant to scale across machines as well as CPUs, so they tend to synchronize via a DB or filesystem rather than directly anyways. Lack of native threads is a pain, but doesn't seem to actually impact performance if you design for processes vs threads.
I agree with your concerns re Ruby's spec itself. Lack of defined grammar, etc. But I don't think Ruby's performance problems are as serious as people say. Sure, any given component might have horrible problems, and might be too hackish to fix (Camping), but that's more a reflection of how easy it is to write a web framework (Camping, under 4k of code, intentionally) and how they aren't as well developed as a larger project would be.
Ruby's odd inconsistencies and little failures (eg. no real x.become y, even with evil.rb) often make me want to learn Smalltalk though.
It seems you've got the same situation then, intentional ignorance. If the stockholder knew of crimes, they'd have to report them. So they choose not to investigate.
We're already using the 'lose all your money' outcome on people who merely invest in a failing company. If that's also the penalty for investing in a criminal enterprise and "not knowing", why not just invest in a criminal venture for higher payouts and no extra risk?
If that went far enough, you could start a company, set the company up to break a law profitably in the near future, and sell all 'control' to some patsy. Your excuse is that the patsy should have noticed the upcoming legal issue and remedied it. You either collect a wind-fall, or lose nothing more than otherwise worthless stock if it's caught.
I still think that shareholders are more able to judge the worth/honesty of a company than the victims of a company. Enron's shareholders were kept in the dark, but so were other companies who dealt with Enron. If the shareholders stood to lose their investment in the case of criminal actions, they'd be more likely to hire an independent auditing firm, or something. Had this been done with Enron they likely could have avoided much of the problem.
If a company/owners/shareholders better audited itself it'd also have a better argument that any crimes committed by its employees weren't intentional and thus, once remedied, shouldn't reflect on the company itself.
If you commit a crime you don't have limited liability. Imagine an arsonist torching a hospital and only being liable up to his assets, but otherwise able to reincorporate and be free the next day. Why do we let crime-by-committee go unpunished? It's more convenient for business, to be able to invest without having a responsibility to investigate, but it'd be easier yet if we just repealed all laws. Why do we pretend to have them when we don't really enforce them?
Too small for a kid's fingers? It's small, like ultra-portables, but I know adults who buy those and like them. The keyboard on the model I used wasn't much smaller than my notebook.
But mainly, I want to laugh at you. Have you noticed the US Dollar recently? You might not have, unless you've looked down. That's it in the couch cushions. Products that were $100 a few years ago are now $150, minimum.
You might want to blame your non-elected slack-witted president for that. Losing cubic meters of cash overseas, fighting multiple endless wars on borrowed funds. Hopefully the OLPC is manufactured in Europe or Japan soon, so that it doesn't end up costing $2800, or worse. The germans needed wheelbarrows to haul worthless money in, have you got your wheelbarrow yet? You won't be able to afford it when you need it!
Exactly. Nobody buys a shiny new macbook intending to swap it onto low-end wintel components, but when your computer breaks you might not be picky. Call it what you will, but you still won't be able to get at your OS & data, all because of a feature Apple added. Isn't that charming.
Just like nobody buys a car intending to run red lights, but would be glad to be able to, to avoid a car-jacking, or when fleeing a sinking New Orleans... A car slaved to every possible traffic regulation would be almost useless in an emergency.
Under that system, 'anticipatory ignorance' could be fatal.
Well that's reasonable. But does control and responsibility for wielding it stop at the employee relationship or does it extend to board members? If so, why not to owners? Or partial owners in the case of stock.
Sometimes Enron happens and people flat-out lie. That's not the shareholders fault. But sometimes the quasi-legal actions are pretty obvious. If SCO's board are liable for the baseless lawsuit, why not people who bought in knowing the facts (ie, baseless case) but hoping for a piece of the phat lawsuit monies.
You're stuck on some warranty issue. I'm not asking for anything of the sort. Nobody expects warranty service when using a product beyond spec.
Yes, I am stuck on the idea that I can do anything I want with a product I own. It's the law. You read? After a sale, the customer owns the product. If they buy a hammer they aren't allowed to kill people with it, but that's not a restriction of the hammer maker but one of the government. After you buy a book you aren't allowed to duplicate it, but that's another governmental restriction, not one of the author or publisher. Even if the author and publisher both neglect to remind you, copyright law still applies. There's no precedent for having to follow restrictions that come on books, and in fact there are laws stating the opposite. The 'first sale' doctrine, in particular, states that the publisher loses their rights in the book the moment it's sold. Nowhere else do people think publishers/manufacturers are entitled to tie functionality to name-brand hardware. Similar restrictions have been overturned frequently (Sega v Accolade) even when it involves overturning trademark rights in favor of interoperation.
Nobody is saying Apple has to make OS X run on commodity hardware - just that it's crippled if it can not, as obviously the machines do function identically and the developer release ran on non-Macs. They say it's for Macs, that's all they have to provide.
What we're saying is that Apple can not forbid emulation/virtualization, nor can they forbid you fixing the OS until it will work. Microsoft couldn't tell you that 3rd party patches were against the EULA, just that they wouldn't guarantee anything (not that they do anyways, but...). Why can Apple?
Flat out, Apple has no legal right to forbid anything once they've sold the product. There's a perfectly good method to retain control called renting. Some firms (mainframes mostly) rent hardware instead of, or as-well as selling it. That way they can forbid customer modifications, as the customer has to return it in pristine condition. This lets them sell CPUs in racks of 64 and software disable the ones you aren't paying for. But to do this, they rent. You know IBM? Really big company. Lots of lawyers. You'd think that if they could have maintained that sort of control of a product they sold that they wouldn't have bothered with the renting... Maybe they know something you don't.
If I bought a macbook, and it died while I was away from other macs, I wouldn't be able to sit down at someone's PC, pop the drive into a USB bay, and boot into my setup. That's crippled. The hardware can do it natively, but even if it couldn't, that's what emulation is about, it's a *lot* better than nothing. Apple is trying to say that you're just not allowed to do that. You could sit at any stranger's mac, but not PCs. You could sit at a Sun workstation that's emulating x86 OSes like Windows, and not be able to use your OS you paid for. That's freaking crippled.
What I really don't understand is why you're denying this. It's obviously crippled. Many products are. Two cameras use the same software, one just disables fancy features based on a setting. That's legal. Just admit it. Why can't you just admit it?
And what would happen if Apple's hardware and OS both had to compete? The market would decide on the value of Mac hardware versus commodity, Dell, etc. The OS is better now than before, many PC users would give it a try and switch. If I had to choose between OS X and Windows, I'd choose mac. I don't think their chances are so bad. But, that said, I don't care either. Tying their hardware to their OS is anti-competitive, the move of someone afraid of criticism or open challenge, and it's a sign of anti-trust behavior. We bitch when Microsoft does it...
It's rude, it's harmful, and it's not legal to enforce.
Some post-sale provisions do get supported, such as the gateway mediation clause, but not the general right of a company to force you, post-sale, into whatever they can write in the EULA.
Pretty much all cases I've seen of EULAs being upheld are where the restrictions were also communicated pre-sale. The ProCD case seemed to hinge on a defense that being told the conditions pre-sale and later buying software without being told this (from a reseller) were separate actions. The court ruled that the pre-sale restrictions were valid because it was clear to both parties that they were intended to be, but not specifically that the paper in the box made it so.
And yes, a precedent for charging people for bypassing DRM will be a bad thing.
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I'm that original poster who said that religion is a joke. What I asserted is that while opinions cannot be disproved, religious claims aren't opinion, they're incorrect fact.
You can play semantic games with my word 'fact', but it's correct to say that I'm typing this message at a keyboard. I can't prove I'm not a brain in a jar in some universal simulator, but unless I am, this is a keyboard... Gravity is a theory, that things fall 'down' is fact. Down is the direction that things fall when dropped - by definition, that things fall when dropped is a fact despite that we have no final knowledge about the mechanism involved. This is what I'm calling a fact.
In this sense, facts can be proved. In fact, many are self-evident because they are a tautology. Things fall down. It's not possible to conclusively demonstrate a negative, such as the lack of white ravens, but that's not the issue here.
Religious claims talk about facts, but are incorrect. I can't disprove you saying 'the concept of god makes me feel fuzzy', it very well might. But if you say 'moses parted the sea, jesus rose from the dead, god created the universe' these are factual claims which can be disproved easily.
Consider that I can disprove your claim not only by showing it to be false, but by showing it to be based on incorrect or faulty reasoning and incapable of being right except by luck. At this point, god is as likely a the flying spaghetti monster.
I'm not saying that no god-like entity exists, just that you don't have the slightest bit of evidence. You're wrong about anything you claim without possible proof, regardless of (untestable) reality.
The nature of religion is to make implausible and untestable claims on the reasoning that they can't actually be proved wrong absolutely and thus that those ideas are as valid as ones made by people who actually understand the issue.
How does it take faith to refuse to believe anything until you see proof?
I guess you could say that I believe it's a bad idea to blindly trust things. Only a religious person could equate examining things for yourself with blind faith.
Not people of any faith, people of any faith who open their mouths and let their faith be known. They're like racists, or idiots who don't know we're fighting a war with their tax dollars. Stupid enough to need to be called on it.
If you still believe in sky fairies you probably believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, Speed Racer, Peter Pan, and all manner of fiction. Or if not, your rationale for choosing one over the other should be amusing. The world isn't for children. If you do believe any of these things you'd better hope that someone cares enough for you to make you feel bad by insulting your faith and wakes you up to reality.
Talking to invisible friends is textbook insanity. Believing god will help you is as damaging as believing homeopathic remedies work, that there's a system for winning the lottery, or that raping children cures aids. All of those ideas have been proven to be wrong, and yet have destroyed families and killed people. Why subscribe to any of them?
Yes, I do generalize all people of faith to be like the KKK - they take the religious orders to be more important than what they see or feel for themselves. They have a higher purpose that can motivate them to do anything in this world, however horrid or dangerous. They abdicate all responsibility for their actions. To fully godwin, they act just like the nazis who were following orders.
Maybe not all religious people are suicide bombers or holy warriors, but that's only because they didn't get a religion that preached that - they certainly aren't exercising critical thinking skills and choosing their own actions or they would be religious. Have whatever philosophy you wish, but when it crosses the line to invisible friends it crosses the line to insanity.
To be religious is pretty much synonymous with not being responsible your own actions.
Sure, you can't disprove a statement that says nothing. Or really even one that states an opinion.
But if a religion does claim something such as Moses parting the sea, then it's in the realm of facts, even if only purportedly, and should be examined as a totally unsupported and counterfactual story (ie, wrong.)
What biblical scholars think is irrelevant. It's what the majority of believers believe that matters. And frankly, unless the OT was prefixed with 'this is just for reference - do not follow' I think it's fairly obvious that it was intended to apply.
Don't forget, the book is supposed to be divinely inspired by god himself. I find it doubtful that he'd be sloppy in this regard... Really any flaws in it at all disprove huge swathes of contemporary christian doctrine. It's taught as truth in church schools that the King James bible translation was guided by god, through the hands of monks who prayed over each word.
What some biblical scholar can weasel out of is far different than what the average believer is raised to believe.
Of course it's obvious from reading the books that both testaments are very different. One is, to borrow a phrase, fire and brimstone, and the other not. I do believe what you say, that scholars make these distinctions. And I even believe they're being truthful. But if it's divinely inspired there shouldn't be any mistakes. If you believe it's divinely inspired you shouldn't dare judge the value of it, that one book is more right than another.
Definition: "Bigot is often used as a pejorative term against a person who is obstinately devoted to prejudices even when these views are challenged or proven to be false or not universally applicable or acceptable."
...", it's "You're an idiot - just fucking stupid." Ditto for 'My god lived, then died, then was reborn, for your right to eat shellfish which is no-longer bad!"
Challenge the belief that all religion is false. Until then, the belief that it is a joke does seem universally acceptable.
Religious people think that because crazy opinions are everywhere (for instance, that Adam Sandler is funny) that their crazy ideas must be just the same, and accepted as valid alternatives. Not at all. Religious people assert fact - that their god exists and their holy book is right. You can't disprove that Adam Sandler is funny because humor is subjective. You can disprove any religious assertions made, because they aren't opinion. They're incorrect fact.
Anyways. Insulting religious people is good. They're stupid and need to be made to realize it, if only so that they slink away from society and don't try to poison more minds with their trash. It's like insulting people who spout KKK filth - cut and belittle them and their opinions until they're ashamed of how people make them feel. The correct answer to "Black are subhuman" isn't "Oh I can see how you might think that, but really
If the person drops the beliefs, they might not be a permanent waste of skin. Until then, they're just lying to you about their sky fairies, or the inferiority of the black man, etc.
If someone persists in believing something obviously wrong you should think less of them. They're either stupid, insane, or lying. None of which is a desirable quality.
The OLPC is made to teach people to program. If kids learn that they'll grow up to program too. Not just on the OLPC, but on any computer they care to sit at.
If we give them a windows computer they'll end up like the 99.98% of users - totally incapable of writing a batch file or scheduling anything to run at a given time.
If we give them a computer where the UI, games, and other programs are written in python (which is available and easy to edit) we can't help but produce children with a far deeper understanding than if we shove their face into Windows and they can't program without downloading 400+ MBs of Visual Studio and accepting a ton of licenses along the way.
People talk about MS office apps, as if any semi-bright child is going to take longer than 30m to learn any of them. The concepts are easy, you write text and after selecting it, select options to change how it looks.
Databases and spreadsheets are trivial to anyone who programs
Giving these kids Apple2s with 1988 software would be better than giving them crippled Windows machines that won't run real software, aren't quite like real MS Windows, are locked down, slow, and unprogrammable. Yeah, that'll help because years of using that substandard machine/OS will substitute for a quick tutorial in MS business apps. Of course it won't teach them anything else in those years, other than maybe how to protect WIndows using a virus scanner, or more likely, having their windows computer trojaned and sending spam endlessly.
You're convinced we need more low-skilled users? I can find you any number of idiots who can run MS Word and can't run a dishwasher. I think we want to encourage programmers and scientists, not idiot wage slaves.
The game of marbles, is it gambling? You buy pieces (giving them a real-world value) and stake them on the outcome of a game.
It's the same online. You buy an account, and perhaps currency (WoW gold, L$, etc) for your character, and your character's equipment. This is directly analogous to your marble bag.
If you PvP (kill another character), it's in game, not real murder. So obviously if my thief character, steals from your character it's not real theft anymore than your killing of my character in retribution is real murder. Marbles trade hands, but we both put them into play and that's how the game works.
If our decision makers were veiled, that might apply. As I know where I ended up, as do they, and don't think I'll be born again, your application of the theory to the real world holds little weight.
Obviously he's right, if we were charged with picking the best society for ourselves to be thrown into randomly, we'd pick a nicer one for everyone than we make after knowing our own position.
But what application does that have to how society did develop? Except perhaps in areas believing in reincarnation, this should have had little effect as those who could do something had little reason to do so, as it obviously had nothing to do with them (having already being born).
Sure, civilization does treat the weak fairly well. But was that the reason for its creation?
As it was the powerful who did the creating, it seems unlikely.
That's because people assume they've got to make some huge switch from one language to another, using the new one for everything.
Any C/C++/Java shop could do itself a huge favor by using to Ruby/Python/Perl for lighter tasks, prototyping etc. If you don't have a library for something, don't try to write that thing in that language. If you do, pick the easiest language for the problem.
Any real coders (as opposed to those who tinker at an existing app but never write new code) are going to be trying new tools all the time. That already blows the 100% consistency that people are trying for anyways. When you've got to learn a new build tool, why not also learn a new language that fits another niche you're working on?
Horses for courses. Don't prototype your new website in C++, don't code your memory manager in Ruby. If you do more than one thing, you'll need more than one tool.
Not really, but neither is a market ruled by MS or Walmart, which was my point. By status quo who do you mean our system of trying to prevent monopoly abuses (AT&T, MS trial), or our system of mostly ignoring Walmart, MS, etc until they truly are monopolies?
If a monopoly is good, well then, our monopoly decided that theirs is out of business. If that's not good, then they'll agree we need rules to control monopoly powers.
Bull. If any religion were even remotely true at least one person could just ask for a miracle while someone documented it. The bible says that miracles happen, so where are they?
It's impossible to *prove* that a god doesn't exist, as I'm sure you're aware. It's trivial however, to prove that one exists, if it does. All we'd have to do is have one miracle performed while we watch. Make the moon vanish temporarily and have the tides change appropriately, give Jupiter rings, turn the sky red across the whole world, speak to everyone at once, all would be adequate proof.
Hundreds of religions, thousands of years, and so very little evidence.
Psst. The emperor's new clothes... they aren't really as good as he thinks.
It's not a government cracking down on a monopoly, it's another monopoly, of road and bridge owners called the public. They're making a strategic decision to not allow you to use their resources and legal benefits (incorporation, etc) if you're pursuing a business course hostile to theirs.
In other words, we own the other 99.9999% of the world that your monopoly (in area X) does not. We act vindictively to those who bite our hands by trying to single-source important parts and screw with price.
Doesn't seem like something a free market monopolist should have a problem with. It's nowhere near as bad as how Walmart treats its suppliers...
It's not like I can walk in, flash my stock certificates, and ask to check out their operations with a hope to find any problems.
.1%, you'd still expect Walmart to have dozens of offending stores each year.
Why not? And before buying too. I can't imagine how they expect people to buy before knowing that. They are trying to sell stock...
Would you buy a share of a partnership without investigating further?
if the average rate for stores violating labor laws are
It could be hundreds. No big deal. It's in how you resolve the problem. If they look for these occurances, promptly report the problem, deal with the person, and try to find a way to keep it from happening again (or find out sooner next time) and actually seem to be discouraging it, then that's great. However, if they have a culture of brushing it under the carpet, shame on them and I think they should be shut down. Fool me 9,342 times this month...
The company that runs the mutual fund doesn't actually own the stock, they're merely holding it for me.
That's not usual, is it. I've seen gold that is allocated - if they go broke, bar #357453 in the vault is yours. But I haven't seen it with Mutual funds, I thought they were all pooled.
As far as stock ownership goes, do you feel responsible for the actions of a stock you hold in a mutual fund? directly?
If your mutual fund picked up SCO stock in 2005, would you have been okay funding their actions? Would you be opposed at holding MS stock when they're paying SCO through an intermediary?
I think the idea is not that over 25% you are a monopoly suddenly, but that at 25% you have to start acting as we'd expect a 'good' monopoly to act.
I think with ads the advertiser will always have choice, because they'll merely have to beat the market rate for the spot they want. As it costs fairly little to host a small business, there likely will be ad servers willing to host them for a price.
I think the real threat would be from the information that they could collect. All searches, ads on sites you didn't search to find, and handling the financials for much of the web's smaller e-commerce. They'd be a little NSA.
They could end up monopolizing a lot of commodity selling too. What does Amazon have? A search engine, with user comments, that sells stuff. Google could hack that together in an hour. If they wanted they'd put everyone else (who didn't add value) out of business.
But, at that, as long as they didn't try to close the market to others (restrictive deals with Fedex, etc) it really wouldn't be a problem. Inefficient access to commodities is simply a phase we're moving out of. It'll be very low margin eventually, but if they want it, I don't see why a market shared between Amazon and Walmart would be better than one dominated by Google.
Well, there's also the secret hope that if they did monopolize the market, they'd put a bunch of ad people out of work, and maybe reduce the amount of visual clutter. They seem to understand when less is more.
I didn't mean that as if guns were a bad thing, but that if you bought corporate stock you might be surprised when you ended up buying guns for some rebel army. (Mark Thatcher?)
I'm not proposing a second check as much as checking for yourself. I wouldn't trust an old home inspection report from the seller, and I wouldn't trust independent auditors hired by the people I didn't trust.
I'm not advocating a special type of stockholder liability, just advocating that the same principle that makes a CEO responsible for the actions of his underlings also makes the owner (even when this is a group of people) responsible for the CEO and on down, etc. And only as responsible as would be reasonable for the lack of attention. If it was unavoidable, less responsibility. If however, you financed a criminal enterprise for a few years because you didn't want to really know, it seems your liability should be unlimited.
Take two identical companies. The one that skimps on QA, hires dumb researchers who can't find a cigarette->cancer link, etc, is going to be the most profitable. They'll be spending less to do business, doing more business, and not cutting off profitable products because of potential problems. The same goes for hiring the worst auditors you can. They cost less and still fulfill legal obligations. If there's no individual liability for an owner, the less careful company is a lot better buy. It'll make far more money, longer, and if caught, punishes you no further than the stockholders of the companies yours bounced checks to as it died.
Really, the idea of limited liability doesn't sit well with my libertarian side. The potential damages to a victim are unlimited, so why should the liability in the accident be different? Why should there be total responsibility for one person, but no responsibility for many?
I don't see how your idea of preventing corporate stock ownership is much better, or much less damaging to the economy. It makes the trail shorter, but if owning stock doesn't confer any risk, why bother? I think not being able to purchase stock with corporate funds would really slow down the market. Mutual funds are this, and in general, don't seem like too bad of a thing. (Except that they make people feel distant and thus not care about the actions done on their dollar.)
I still think risk should go to stockholders, perhaps companies who have stockholders of their own. Eventually you reach individuals. It seems to cover the problems of corporate stock ownership by making sure that the consequences aren't negated, just divided again.
I'm not expecting everyone foot the entire bill for Arthur Andersen for a year. But if you want to invest in a company perhaps you should find other potential shareholders to investigate it with you. Especially with the net, it should be fairly easy to arrange. If the company itself is paying for an 'independent' audit, perhaps it's not so independent... That's why I think Enron is a good example.
It would eat into profits, but so do laws in general. So does general due diligence.
And yes, I do think it should extend to mutual funds. That's what mutual-fund companies are for, but investors should be investigating to see that they do a good job.
If you have $100 to invest, perhaps you have $10 to invest to make sure the other $90 isn't going to go to buying guns, or whatever.
If I buy a TV it's my responsibility to make sure it's not stolen. In simple cases where I could hardly have known it'd simply be given back to the original owner. In cases where I'd bought it off the back of a truck, repeatedly, I'd be charged with receiving stolen goods, conspiracy, etc. When due diligence is done I stand to lose my TV money. When it's not, I could lose far more including my freedom.
Why does buying a TV from a purported company come with far more risk than investing in the company and buying a TV with those funds?
In fact, it seems far easier for the potential stockholder to ask where the TVs come from and get a real answer than for a customer.
As for crimes being discovered... Microsoft intentionally claimed that removing IE from Windows would slow it down. They produced a video which showed this. It turned out that the video was faked. Microsoft claimed that this was a mistake, something done by a low-level employee. They had claimed it for months, had a VP testify to it, and it was the mistake of a low-level employee? Had I faked evidence in a federal trial I'd still be suffering. Microsoft can use the excuse 'we're too big to totally watch' and as long as the top people didn't provably intend it, we don't punish them. As for SCO, they intentionally lied in many cases. And Microsoft indirectly funneled them a lot of money. But because of how if a company does it, it's fine, neither of them are looking at losing anything more than their original investment, despite costing that much from their targets, and potentially having ruined their competitors totally. If SCO or any members are convicted of crimes, shouldn't this go back up the chain of funding to Microsoft? (or, to individual stockholders who can't be bothered to investigate.)
There's a lot higher payoff there for a successful crime than simply losing your funds.
And there's a fairly poor record of companies being punished at all for this. If I filed a fake DMCA takedown I'd be criminally charged for lying, sued for slander, etc. A RIAA company does 50 knowingly less-than-sure takedowns a day. If they wanted to be sure, they'd investigate, but that'd cost too much so they file fraudulent federal paperwork. Punishment? None. Revocation the right to file takedowns? Hell no!
Many companies seem to use their vast size as an excuse for their behavior. I think it's a reason to break them up for scrap and sell them to new owners who promise to follow societies laws.
And yes, if I continually committed crimes such that my parents should have known, and benefited from them, yes I think they should be charged too. If living off the avails of prostitution is a crime, so should living off the avails of a knowingly illegal business opportunity, or willful ignorance to avoid knowing.
In my last post I said that if companies better policed themselves for any and all crime, they'd have a better shot at saying the company itself didn't commit them. One broken law is the employee, one a day that the company benefits from is the company's resposibility even if everyone is technically innocent.
I don't dislike businesses or investors. Really. I simply wish that everyone were held to the same standard.
To actually do any given thing, no.
/Foo/i for regexps, etc.
:desired_method and then treat the object like it's what you want regardless of which actual class it is).
To program in for fun, yes. To do things you'd never have thought of doing, yes.
Blocks and iterators: [1,2,3].collect {|x| x ** 3 }.each {|x| puts x.to_i }
It's like specifying arguments that contain code. Functions you otherwise would have to pass a ton of arguments to, or provide a call-back function for, take an anonymous block.
Ruby's a very quick language. You can get something done quickly like Perl, and it has nice shortcuts like "foobar" =~
If you dislike modifying built-in classes, class Array ; def to_s ; #new behavior ; super ; end ; end then you might not like Ruby.
If you want type checking, you might not like Ruby. Or, you might like duck-typing (obj.respond_to?
If you like to program, give it a try. If it's just a work thing, as someone else said, stick with what works for you.
1) Depends on what you're writing. big_array.collect {|x| x.expensive_file_io }.sort_by {|x| x.to_s } is going to be stuck in library code far more than interpreting Ruby.
2) Granted. Yet the Ruby community seems more cohesive than other languages. JRuby and Rubinius are intentionally staying close to Ruby. Of course, in JRuby, much of what you do wouldn't work without the J, so it's not back-portable, but technically would be.
3) See 1. A ruby process only wastes the time interpreting and garbage collecting that you design it to. IPC does take longer than inter-thread, but most server type projects I've written in Ruby are meant to scale across machines as well as CPUs, so they tend to synchronize via a DB or filesystem rather than directly anyways. Lack of native threads is a pain, but doesn't seem to actually impact performance if you design for processes vs threads.
I agree with your concerns re Ruby's spec itself. Lack of defined grammar, etc. But I don't think Ruby's performance problems are as serious as people say. Sure, any given component might have horrible problems, and might be too hackish to fix (Camping), but that's more a reflection of how easy it is to write a web framework (Camping, under 4k of code, intentionally) and how they aren't as well developed as a larger project would be.
Ruby's odd inconsistencies and little failures (eg. no real x.become y, even with evil.rb) often make me want to learn Smalltalk though.
It seems you've got the same situation then, intentional ignorance. If the stockholder knew of crimes, they'd have to report them. So they choose not to investigate.
We're already using the 'lose all your money' outcome on people who merely invest in a failing company. If that's also the penalty for investing in a criminal enterprise and "not knowing", why not just invest in a criminal venture for higher payouts and no extra risk?
If that went far enough, you could start a company, set the company up to break a law profitably in the near future, and sell all 'control' to some patsy. Your excuse is that the patsy should have noticed the upcoming legal issue and remedied it. You either collect a wind-fall, or lose nothing more than otherwise worthless stock if it's caught.
I still think that shareholders are more able to judge the worth/honesty of a company than the victims of a company. Enron's shareholders were kept in the dark, but so were other companies who dealt with Enron. If the shareholders stood to lose their investment in the case of criminal actions, they'd be more likely to hire an independent auditing firm, or something. Had this been done with Enron they likely could have avoided much of the problem.
If a company/owners/shareholders better audited itself it'd also have a better argument that any crimes committed by its employees weren't intentional and thus, once remedied, shouldn't reflect on the company itself.
If you commit a crime you don't have limited liability. Imagine an arsonist torching a hospital and only being liable up to his assets, but otherwise able to reincorporate and be free the next day. Why do we let crime-by-committee go unpunished? It's more convenient for business, to be able to invest without having a responsibility to investigate, but it'd be easier yet if we just repealed all laws. Why do we pretend to have them when we don't really enforce them?
Too small for a kid's fingers? It's small, like ultra-portables, but I know adults who buy those and like them. The keyboard on the model I used wasn't much smaller than my notebook.
But mainly, I want to laugh at you. Have you noticed the US Dollar recently? You might not have, unless you've looked down. That's it in the couch cushions. Products that were $100 a few years ago are now $150, minimum.
You might want to blame your non-elected slack-witted president for that. Losing cubic meters of cash overseas, fighting multiple endless wars on borrowed funds. Hopefully the OLPC is manufactured in Europe or Japan soon, so that it doesn't end up costing $2800, or worse. The germans needed wheelbarrows to haul worthless money in, have you got your wheelbarrow yet? You won't be able to afford it when you need it!
Exactly. Nobody buys a shiny new macbook intending to swap it onto low-end wintel components, but when your computer breaks you might not be picky. Call it what you will, but you still won't be able to get at your OS & data, all because of a feature Apple added. Isn't that charming.
Just like nobody buys a car intending to run red lights, but would be glad to be able to, to avoid a car-jacking, or when fleeing a sinking New Orleans... A car slaved to every possible traffic regulation would be almost useless in an emergency.
These people seem to want a less useful product.
Well that's reasonable. But does control and responsibility for wielding it stop at the employee relationship or does it extend to board members? If so, why not to owners? Or partial owners in the case of stock.
Sometimes Enron happens and people flat-out lie. That's not the shareholders fault. But sometimes the quasi-legal actions are pretty obvious. If SCO's board are liable for the baseless lawsuit, why not people who bought in knowing the facts (ie, baseless case) but hoping for a piece of the phat lawsuit monies.
You're stuck on some warranty issue. I'm not asking for anything of the sort. Nobody expects warranty service when using a product beyond spec.
Yes, I am stuck on the idea that I can do anything I want with a product I own. It's the law. You read? After a sale, the customer owns the product. If they buy a hammer they aren't allowed to kill people with it, but that's not a restriction of the hammer maker but one of the government. After you buy a book you aren't allowed to duplicate it, but that's another governmental restriction, not one of the author or publisher. Even if the author and publisher both neglect to remind you, copyright law still applies. There's no precedent for having to follow restrictions that come on books, and in fact there are laws stating the opposite. The 'first sale' doctrine, in particular, states that the publisher loses their rights in the book the moment it's sold. Nowhere else do people think publishers/manufacturers are entitled to tie functionality to name-brand hardware. Similar restrictions have been overturned frequently (Sega v Accolade) even when it involves overturning trademark rights in favor of interoperation.
Nobody is saying Apple has to make OS X run on commodity hardware - just that it's crippled if it can not, as obviously the machines do function identically and the developer release ran on non-Macs. They say it's for Macs, that's all they have to provide.
What we're saying is that Apple can not forbid emulation/virtualization, nor can they forbid you fixing the OS until it will work. Microsoft couldn't tell you that 3rd party patches were against the EULA, just that they wouldn't guarantee anything (not that they do anyways, but...). Why can Apple?
Flat out, Apple has no legal right to forbid anything once they've sold the product. There's a perfectly good method to retain control called renting. Some firms (mainframes mostly) rent hardware instead of, or as-well as selling it. That way they can forbid customer modifications, as the customer has to return it in pristine condition. This lets them sell CPUs in racks of 64 and software disable the ones you aren't paying for. But to do this, they rent. You know IBM? Really big company. Lots of lawyers. You'd think that if they could have maintained that sort of control of a product they sold that they wouldn't have bothered with the renting... Maybe they know something you don't.
If I bought a macbook, and it died while I was away from other macs, I wouldn't be able to sit down at someone's PC, pop the drive into a USB bay, and boot into my setup. That's crippled. The hardware can do it natively, but even if it couldn't, that's what emulation is about, it's a *lot* better than nothing. Apple is trying to say that you're just not allowed to do that. You could sit at any stranger's mac, but not PCs. You could sit at a Sun workstation that's emulating x86 OSes like Windows, and not be able to use your OS you paid for. That's freaking crippled.
What I really don't understand is why you're denying this. It's obviously crippled. Many products are. Two cameras use the same software, one just disables fancy features based on a setting. That's legal. Just admit it. Why can't you just admit it?
And what would happen if Apple's hardware and OS both had to compete? The market would decide on the value of Mac hardware versus commodity, Dell, etc. The OS is better now than before, many PC users would give it a try and switch. If I had to choose between OS X and Windows, I'd choose mac. I don't think their chances are so bad. But, that said, I don't care either. Tying their hardware to their OS is anti-competitive, the move of someone afraid of criticism or open challenge, and it's a sign of anti-trust behavior. We bitch when Microsoft does it...
It's rude, it's harmful, and it's not legal to enforce.
Some post-sale provisions do get supported, such as the gateway mediation clause, but not the general right of a company to force you, post-sale, into whatever they can write in the EULA.
Pretty much all cases I've seen of EULAs being upheld are where the restrictions were also communicated pre-sale. The ProCD case seemed to hinge on a defense that being told the conditions pre-sale and later buying software without being told this (from a reseller) were separate actions. The court ruled that the pre-sale restrictions were valid because it was clear to both parties that they were intended to be, but not specifically that the paper in the box made it so.
And yes, a precedent for charging people for bypassing DRM will be a bad thing.