'An EULA is an enforcable contract as long as it is not too "one-sided" or "unconscionable"'
How do I know if its not one sided or unconscionable without professional legal advice?
How can I be expected to obtain professional legal advice for every pissy little purchase!
If you don't stop it here and now everything will come with a seal and EULA, not just software EVERYTHING. Break the seal and you agree to the EULA, there's no difference between clicking to accept and EULA, and breaking a seal.
"The big problem most people have with EULA's is that they aren't presented at the time of purchase. "
No the big problem is, people don't and can't be expected to enter into a contract (which is what an EULA purports to be) for a minor purchase for a few $$.
Realistically these densely worded contracts you would have to get professional advice in order to know your rights and loss of rights. You can't do that for every $40 purchase.
What's more is, its impractical to obtain that legal advice when your in a shop, even if you were presented with the contract just before purchase.
What I think you should do is this:
Write a letter saying that regardless of what the EULA says, you do not accept it, will not read it and are not entering into a contract with the publisher. If they don't like it, they can arrange to collect their software from you at a convienient time and give you a full refund.
Send the letter off to them, THEN INSTALL IT.
If they can impose terms after the sale on you, you can impose terms after the sale on them. If its reasonable for them to expect you to return to the shop at your expense, its reasonable for the shop to collect it from you at their expense (or the publishers).
"Combined, the 1998-99 crop of Mars missions -- Climate Orbiter, Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 -- cost about $320 million. That's about a 10th the cost of the Viking mission that successfully landed two spacecraft on the red planet in 1976."
So $83 million should be plenty to do this mission.
Mars polar lander for example, including all the after costs, was only $328 million, and that was for a MARS mission, and a LANDER, not an orbiter.
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/msur98.htm
"The Mars Surveyor '98 program spacecraft development cost 193.1 million dollars. Launch costs are estimated at 91.7 million dollars and mission operations at 42.8 million dollars. "
"Microsoft has seen a 300 percent increase in the last three months of the number of Web sites hosted on its recently launched Windows Server 2003 software--with a considerable amount of the new business representing migrations from Linux, according to a survey published this week."
http://www.wininsider.com/news/?5483
Then a few months later it turned out they'd simply paid a domain holding company to hold domains on Windows server. A few months later they switched back.
Sounds like they've paid a few companies to switch for the PR value. It's difficult to imagine that companies switch, then profess their previous bad decision to the press.
I re-read your first comment and thought it deserved a fuller response than me simply explaining what an 'overvote' is.
Consider the case of badly marked votes on a paper scanner machine. You might think that to count under or overvotes or bad votes on those machines would take a change in the rules, but this isn't true.
From Greg Palasts investigation:
"Sancho's used paper ballots. These ballots are read by machine, "optically scanned." He had set up a voting machine to demonstrate its use. I tried it out, voting for Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader - a deliberate error as a gag for a documentary film crew. I marked the ballot, then put it into a slot in the machine and - grrrr-zunt! - it shot back into my hands, recognizing my error.
You cannot make a voting mistake on this machine, called an "Accuvote." Mighty cool. But if you can't make a mistake, how did so many votes "spoil" in paper ballot counties? I asked a clerk: Does every county using paper ballots have this machine?
The answer - yes and no - was disturbing. The adjoining county, Gadsden, also had machine-read paper ballots, but did not activate the reject mechanism. Make one wrong mark on your ballot in Gadsden and your ballot disappears into the machine - it will not be counted....
So I asked what I call The Florida Question: "By any chance, do you know the racial profile of counties where machines accept bad ballots?" Then I got The Florida Answer: "We've been waiting for someone to ask us that." The clerk then pulled out a huge multicolored sheet, listing, for every Florida county, the number of ballots not counted. The proportion of uncounted ballots to the Black population, county by county, was a nearly perfect match."
--------------
If the machine's could be set not to accept badly marked papers, yet they accepted badly marked papers in black districts, then those machines were set to accept bad papers in black districts.
Since blacks vote more for democrats, it was an attempt to maximize bad voting papers in mainly black/Democrat districts and minimize them in white/Republican ones.
The white's got to retry, the black's didn't.
So if you were calculating what would have happened if those machines were set equally under the SAME RULES, you would count overmarked and unmarked ballots in black voting districts because those ballots wouldn't have been over or undermarked if the machines hadn't have been 'tweaked'.
"No, not true. Bush won every recount that did not change the rules"
If I stamp a hole for "Gore" and write "Gore" on the paper, who did I vote for?
On the voter purge, please read the link I gave you, what they did was very very clever. Moore dumbed it down to a couple of sentences, but this book explains the true genius in how it worked.
"This PDB is one of about 250 Bush received before 9-11. The "D" stands for daily, meaning he gets one every day"
Thats what, 3 memos a day on average he has to get through?!
If he was in over his head he should have gotten help to tackle the workload. That's what leadership is about.
In this case Rice admitted they didn't know the FTA had withdrawn air marshals from internal flights because THEY DIDN'T CONSULT WITH THEM!. If they had, the FTA would have known to put the sky marshalls back and the terrorists would have faced armed sky marshalls.
Deceits 1-2 [DK claims something false, then shoots down his own claim.]
Deceit 3 MM: Bush lost on manual recount. [True] DK: Bush won if only 4 states are recounted: [also true.]
Deceit 4 MM: Jeb Bush Purged the roll of Democrat blacks. DK: Incomplete explanation. [Yes it is incomplete, it was far cleverer a purge than that. This site explains in more detail:
http://www.gregpalast.com/bestdemocracymoneycanb uy chapter1.pdf ]
Deceit 5 MM: Bush got pelted with eggs. DK: It was only 1 egg.
Deceit 6-7 MM: Washington Post says Bush on vacation 42% of time. DK: It was less than this.
Deceit 8-10 MM: Jokes that Bush should have read the Aug 6 memo "Bin Laden determined to attack in US" DK: Bush did read it
[Does that my it better or worse? Remember that (from Rice appearance before the panel) sky marshalls had been removed from domestic US flights, if Rice or Bush had told the FTA about the memo those marshalls would have been put back on the flights and 911 would not have been possible.]
Ignoring your plagarism for a moment (mentioned above), I think they lost it much earlier at DS9.
Deep Space 9 was just a Soap Opera covering the life's and loves of the people aboard a space station as they grow. It was no different than any other soap opera plot.
Voyager, was a story of the life's and loves of people as they grow aboard a spaceship travelling back to earth. Same soap opera formula, this time set aboard a space ship. Whoopy!
Enterprise I didn't watch, I switched off half way through Voyager.
Just kill it already, and don't get me started on Simpsons latest series....
"If my name is not on one of the secret lists the government maintains how is showing my ID with my real name going to stop me from doing anything? I'm not a list!"
You are now, you most definitely are now. After you said this:
"Besides,... I'm going to crash a plane (or car, boat, whatever)"
But that's the point isn't it! Its to stop spammers hiding behind faked addresses. If they publish proper SPF records then the spammer black list catches them.
If they fake their address to a domain publishing SPF records then the SPF check fails and the message gets flagged for aggressive filtering them.
"This means that Microsoft's forthcoming Caller ID patents probably cover SPF. That's the real problem here"
The ideas sure, they might cover SPF, but the patents cover implementation not ideas so it would be extremely difficult for MS to go after the ideas in SPF.
Also the exact nature of Microsofts claimed 'IP' patent rights is not known yet. Most likely its the same as their other XML patents, covering the layout of the XML, so not relevent to SPF at all.
"When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn't give you two backup copies."
So I own the Cognac glasses then, they are mine and I'm responsible if I break my glasses?
"There is no fair use to take something that doesn't belong to you."
So I don't own the glasses then, they belong to you still?
"Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever."
So I'm buying the digital copy (which lasts forever) and not the carrier its on? The carrier most certainly does not last forever. So format shifting is OK then.
" I have a TiVo set." Lucky for him, if that Jack Valenti had his way, he wouldn't even have a VCR.
'And if you don't like it, then you can choose not to buy the house. Just like you can choose not to use MS products. There's no "ransom" involved in either case.'
You want a driveway to your house? $10,000 to cross my 1 inch strip of land.
You want to edit all those documents you have? That'll be $400 for a license.
The whole point of a ransom strip is it's small enough to be overlooked on the map, the small print talks vaguely about land not owned by the owner. The sting is *after* the purchase, the buyer doesn't know the difference between the ransom strip owned by the developer and the pavement owned by the council or the tenants association.
The solution of course is to explain to everyone what a ransom strip is, how they work, what the trap is and tell them to avoid the trap.
When a property developer makes a house, they will often sell the house and the land, but keep ownership of a small strip of land between the house and the street which they license to you.
If you want further access (e.g. for a garage, a second garden path etc.) then they'll happily sell it to you for a huge amount.
Those are called 'ransom strips'. They hold you to ransom for access to your own property by controlling a small strip of land around it.
Microsoft is just open sourcing stuff it has surrounded by ransom strips. The GPL would protect against these tricks, but Microsoft don't use the GPL.
So it's not a real open source effort, its just MS playing its little word, license and patent games.
Its very simple, Microsoft's revenue is $36.8B it employs 55000 it has a high revenue per employee of $669k. It has a monopoly so that high revenue/employee is not suprising.
Other companies are not so lucky:
GE revenue is 140 Billion, it employs 305000, thats $459K per employee. Citigroup $240K per employee Walmart $183K per employee...
If companies spend less on Microsoft products and invest it in their own business with similar results to their existing business, then they will create more jobs.
So, if Walmart saves 10 million by not buying Microsoft licenses and switching to Linux and invests it in its own company, it will likely create 55 jobs.
Microsoft will lose $10m (i.e. 15 jobs). A net gain of 40 jobs.
Walmart jobs are low grade, a more realistic example is Citigroup. 10 million saved on Windows licenses is worth 26 extra jobs.
My point is, it isn't just that companies spend the money on themselves, it's that they employ more people for each $ revenue than Microsoft, so every dollar saved creates more jobs than a $ going to Microsoft.
There's a green paper due on the BBC later in the year. A pre-report has already been critical of the BBC's online activities, suggesting it does too much itself.
From an investigation in August 2003: http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publicatio ns/arch ive_2004/BBC_Online_Review.htm
You can bet MS (or Microsoft lobbyists the BSA) will try damn hard to kill this project.
I wish the BBC would stop dragging its feet and do it, start releasing the archive now with their codec, before the politicians kill.
A company that sacks 500 programmers needs 500 more VPs to manage all those progra... oh wait that doesn't make sense at all!
I think you'll find the CIO calls himself an IT professional too, and that you are the exception rather than the rule in calling yourself non "IT Professional".
Even if it does represent people climbimg the corporate ladder, its not a ladder, its a pyramid with fewer jobs higher up than lower down.
"1) This discussion has been unprofessional in the extreme. "
Get a thicker skin.
"2) The IETF is an engineering body, and it makes engineering decisions. It cares about licensing only as it affects the ability to implement and deploy a standard. "
The wording requires you get a license from Microsoft and that any future products require a license too. So clearly this problem comes under the "ability to implement" part of the sentence.
3) There is no such thing as a 'defensive' patent. Ted cannot see into the mind of Microsoft and determine their intent is to only use it for defence. Therefore he cannot make this statement with any substance behind it.
4) Non substantial argument. The license is very clear, show me a lawyer that says otherwise.
5) Agreed.
"New drafts are now out, waiting for careful review. I urge the working group to review them carefully and to focus on how they can be interpreted, coded, and deployed. We have a lot of work to do. "
Oh boy, we have a spec that has issues XYZ, he's telling them to look at X and only X. i.e. to ignore Y & Z and make a decision based on only part of the information.
Slashdot Mirror
Another point:
A legal minor isn't capable of entering into a contract. If a child installs the software, how can they have been considered to have accepted an EULA?
'An EULA is an enforcable contract as long as it is not too "one-sided" or "unconscionable"'
How do I know if its not one sided or unconscionable without professional legal advice?
How can I be expected to obtain professional legal advice for every pissy little purchase!
If you don't stop it here and now everything will come with a seal and EULA, not just software EVERYTHING. Break the seal and you agree to the EULA, there's no difference between clicking to accept and EULA, and breaking a seal.
"Clickwrap should NOT enforcable contract law!"
Totally 100% agree.
There's no purchase when you obtain GPL'd software, there's no *sale* as such.
So your not paying for a set of rights and then having your purchase rights taken away from you afterwards.
"The big problem most people have with EULA's is that they aren't presented at the time of purchase. "
No the big problem is, people don't and can't be expected to enter into a contract (which is what an EULA purports to be) for a minor purchase for a few $$.
Realistically these densely worded contracts you would have to get professional advice in order to know your rights and loss of rights. You can't do that for every $40 purchase.
What's more is, its impractical to obtain that legal advice when your in a shop, even if you were presented with the contract just before purchase.
What I think you should do is this:
Write a letter saying that regardless of what the EULA says, you do not accept it, will not read it and are not entering into a contract with the publisher. If they don't like it, they can arrange to collect their software from you at a convienient time and give you a full refund.
Send the letter off to them, THEN INSTALL IT.
If they can impose terms after the sale on you, you can impose terms after the sale on them. If its reasonable for them to expect you to return to the shop at your expense, its reasonable for the shop to collect it from you at their expense (or the publishers).
http://www.cnn.com/1999/TECH/space/12/08/mars.revi ew/
"Combined, the 1998-99 crop of Mars missions -- Climate Orbiter, Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 -- cost about $320 million. That's about a 10th the cost of the Viking mission that successfully landed two spacecraft on the red planet in 1976."
So $83 million should be plenty to do this mission.
Mars polar lander for example, including all the after costs, was only $328 million, and that was for a MARS mission, and a LANDER, not an orbiter.
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/msur98.htm
"The Mars Surveyor '98 program spacecraft development cost 193.1 million dollars. Launch costs are estimated at 91.7 million dollars and mission operations at 42.8 million dollars. "
So an $88 million estimate sounds about right.
Remember this from 2003?
"Microsoft has seen a 300 percent increase in the last three months of the number of Web sites hosted on its recently launched Windows Server 2003 software--with a considerable amount of the new business representing migrations from Linux, according to a survey published this week."
http://www.wininsider.com/news/?5483
Then a few months later it turned out they'd simply paid a domain holding company to hold domains on Windows server. A few months later they switched back.
Sounds like they've paid a few companies to switch for the PR value. It's difficult to imagine that companies switch, then profess their previous bad decision to the press.
"and how the movie is 'unlike anything most audiences have seen before. It uses no sets, only computer generated imagery."
Gosh, so Finding Nemo had sets? I often wondered how the fish found their motivation...
Mary Poppings, Who framed Roger Rabbit...
I re-read your first comment and thought it deserved a fuller response than me simply explaining what an 'overvote' is.
Consider the case of badly marked votes on a paper scanner machine. You might think that to count under or overvotes or bad votes on those machines would take a change in the rules, but this isn't true.
From Greg Palasts investigation:
"Sancho's used paper ballots. These ballots are read by machine, "optically scanned." He had set up a voting machine to demonstrate its use. I tried it out, voting for Pat Buchanan and Ralph
Nader - a deliberate error as a gag for a documentary film crew. I marked the ballot, then put it into a slot in the machine and
- grrrr-zunt! - it shot back into my hands, recognizing my error.
You cannot make a voting mistake on this machine, called an "Accuvote." Mighty cool. But if you can't make a mistake, how did so many votes "spoil" in paper ballot counties? I asked a clerk: Does every county using paper ballots have this machine?
The answer - yes and no - was disturbing. The adjoining county, Gadsden, also had machine-read paper ballots, but did not activate the reject mechanism. Make one wrong mark on your ballot in Gadsden and your ballot disappears into the machine - it will not be counted....
So I asked what I call The Florida Question: "By any chance, do you know the racial profile of counties where machines accept bad ballots?"
Then I got The Florida Answer: "We've been waiting for someone to ask us that." The clerk then pulled out a huge multicolored sheet, listing, for every Florida county, the number of
ballots not counted. The proportion of uncounted ballots to the Black population, county by county, was a nearly perfect match."
--------------
If the machine's could be set not to accept badly marked papers, yet they accepted badly marked papers in black districts, then those machines were set to accept bad papers in black districts.
Since blacks vote more for democrats, it was an attempt to maximize bad voting papers in mainly black/Democrat districts and minimize them in white/Republican ones.
The white's got to retry, the black's didn't.
So if you were calculating what would have happened if those machines were set equally under the SAME RULES, you would count overmarked and unmarked ballots in black voting districts because those ballots wouldn't have been over or undermarked if the machines hadn't have been 'tweaked'.
"No, not true. Bush won every recount that did not change the rules"
If I stamp a hole for "Gore" and write "Gore" on the paper, who did I vote for?
On the voter purge, please read the link I gave you, what they did was very very clever. Moore dumbed it down to a couple of sentences, but this book explains the true genius in how it worked.
"This PDB is one of about 250 Bush received before 9-11. The "D" stands for daily, meaning he gets one every day"
Thats what, 3 memos a day on average he has to get through?!
If he was in over his head he should have gotten help to tackle the workload. That's what leadership is about.
In this case Rice admitted they didn't know the FTA had withdrawn air marshals from internal flights because THEY DIDN'T CONSULT WITH THEM!. If they had, the FTA would have known to put the sky marshalls back and the terrorists would have faced armed sky marshalls.
Boy is that Dave Kopel piece weak.
b uy chapter1.pdf
Deceits 1-2
[DK claims something false, then shoots down his own claim.]
Deceit 3
MM: Bush lost on manual recount. [True]
DK: Bush won if only 4 states are recounted: [also true.]
Deceit 4
MM: Jeb Bush Purged the roll of Democrat blacks.
DK: Incomplete explanation.
[Yes it is incomplete, it was far cleverer a purge than that. This site explains in more detail:
http://www.gregpalast.com/bestdemocracymoneycan
]
Deceit 5
MM: Bush got pelted with eggs.
DK: It was only 1 egg.
Deceit 6-7
MM: Washington Post says Bush on vacation 42% of time.
DK: It was less than this.
Deceit 8-10
MM: Jokes that Bush should have read the Aug 6 memo "Bin Laden determined to attack in US"
DK: Bush did read it
[Does that my it better or worse? Remember that (from Rice appearance before the panel) sky marshalls had been removed from domestic US flights, if Rice or Bush had told the FTA about the memo those marshalls would have been put back on the flights and 911 would not have been possible.]
and on and on, its all so feable...
Ignoring your plagarism for a moment (mentioned above), I think they lost it much earlier at DS9.
Deep Space 9 was just a Soap Opera covering the life's and loves of the people aboard a space station as they grow. It was no different than any other soap opera plot.
Voyager, was a story of the life's and loves of people as they grow aboard a spaceship travelling back to earth. Same soap opera formula, this time set aboard a space ship. Whoopy!
Enterprise I didn't watch, I switched off half way through Voyager.
Just kill it already, and don't get me started on Simpsons latest series....
"If my name is not on one of the secret lists the government maintains how is showing my ID with my real name going to stop me from doing anything? I'm not a list!"
... I'm going to crash a plane (or car, boat, whatever)"
You are now, you most definitely are now. After you said this:
"Besides,
Yes Mr Wombat, you are now.
But that's the point isn't it! Its to stop spammers hiding behind faked addresses. If they publish proper SPF records then the spammer black list catches them.
If they fake their address to a domain publishing SPF records then the SPF check fails and the message gets flagged for aggressive filtering them.
Either way they're screwed.
Thats Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite.com
He submits a lot of stories to publications 'reviewing' how totally super duper Microsoft products are.
I'm surprised Newscientist didn't research him before printing his 'review'.
"This means that Microsoft's forthcoming Caller ID patents probably cover SPF. That's the real problem here"
The ideas sure, they might cover SPF, but the patents cover implementation not ideas so it would be extremely difficult for MS to go after the ideas in SPF.
Also the exact nature of Microsofts claimed 'IP' patent rights is not known yet. Most likely its the same as their other XML patents, covering the layout of the XML, so not relevent to SPF at all.
"When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn't give you two backup copies."
So I own the Cognac glasses then, they are mine and I'm responsible if I break my glasses?
"There is no fair use to take something that doesn't belong to you."
So I don't own the glasses then, they belong to you still?
"Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever."
So I'm buying the digital copy (which lasts forever) and not the carrier its on?
The carrier most certainly does not last forever.
So format shifting is OK then.
" I have a TiVo set."
Lucky for him, if that Jack Valenti had his way, he wouldn't even have a VCR.
http://www.greenfielddevelopment.net/Rightsofacces s.htm
'And if you don't like it, then you can choose not to buy the house. Just like you can choose not to use MS products. There's no "ransom" involved in either case.'
You want a driveway to your house? $10,000 to cross my 1 inch strip of land.
You want to edit all those documents you have? That'll be $400 for a license.
The whole point of a ransom strip is it's small enough to be overlooked on the map, the small print talks vaguely about land not owned by the owner. The sting is *after* the purchase, the buyer doesn't know the difference between the ransom strip owned by the developer and the pavement owned by the council or the tenants association.
The solution of course is to explain to everyone what a ransom strip is, how they work, what the trap is and tell them to avoid the trap.
Hence my comment above.
When a property developer makes a house, they will often sell the house and the land, but keep ownership of a small strip of land between the house and the street which they license to you.
If you want further access (e.g. for a garage, a second garden path etc.) then they'll happily sell it to you for a huge amount.
Those are called 'ransom strips'. They hold you to ransom for access to your own property by controlling a small strip of land around it.
Microsoft is just open sourcing stuff it has surrounded by ransom strips. The GPL would protect against these tricks, but Microsoft don't use the GPL.
So it's not a real open source effort, its just MS playing its little word, license and patent games.
He missed a major point in section 7.
LINUX MAKES JOBS.
Its very simple, Microsoft's revenue is $36.8B it employs 55000 it has a high revenue per employee of $669k. It has a monopoly so that high revenue/employee is not suprising.
Other companies are not so lucky:
GE revenue is 140 Billion, it employs 305000, thats $459K per employee.
Citigroup $240K per employee
Walmart $183K per employee...
If companies spend less on Microsoft products and invest it in their own business with similar results to their existing business, then they will create more jobs.
So, if Walmart saves 10 million by not buying Microsoft licenses and switching to Linux
and invests it in its own company, it will likely create 55 jobs.
Microsoft will lose $10m (i.e. 15 jobs). A net gain of 40 jobs.
Walmart jobs are low grade, a more realistic example is Citigroup. 10 million saved on Windows licenses is worth 26 extra jobs.
My point is, it isn't just that companies spend the money on themselves, it's that they employ more people for each $ revenue than Microsoft, so every dollar saved creates more jobs than a $ going to Microsoft.
There's a green paper due on the BBC later in the year. A pre-report has already been critical of the BBC's online activities, suggesting it does too much itself.
o ns/arch ive_2004/BBC_Online_Review.htm
From an investigation in August 2003:
http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publicati
You can bet MS (or Microsoft lobbyists the BSA) will try damn hard to kill this project.
I wish the BBC would stop dragging its feet and do it, start releasing the archive now with their codec, before the politicians kill.
A company that sacks 500 programmers needs 500 more VPs to manage all those progra... oh wait that doesn't make sense at all!
I think you'll find the CIO calls himself an IT professional too, and that you are the exception rather than the rule in calling yourself non "IT Professional".
Even if it does represent people climbimg the corporate ladder, its not a ladder, its a pyramid with fewer jobs higher up than lower down.
So even then, it would represent fewer jobs.
IP rights are retained by default unless waived licensed or assigned.
So show me where Microsoft waives their rights to allow anyone to use Microsoft's part of the merged spec!
"1) This discussion has been unprofessional in the extreme. "
Get a thicker skin.
"2) The IETF is an engineering body, and it makes engineering decisions. It cares about licensing only as it affects the ability to implement and deploy a standard. "
The wording requires you get a license from Microsoft and that any future products require a license too. So clearly this problem comes under the "ability to implement" part of the sentence.
3) There is no such thing as a 'defensive' patent. Ted cannot see into the mind of Microsoft and determine their intent is to only use it for defence. Therefore he cannot make this statement with any substance behind it.
4) Non substantial argument. The license is very clear, show me a lawyer that says otherwise.
5) Agreed.
"New drafts are now out, waiting for careful review. I urge the working group to review them carefully and to focus on how they can be interpreted, coded, and deployed. We have a lot of work to do. "
Oh boy, we have a spec that has issues XYZ,
he's telling them to look at X and only X. i.e. to ignore Y & Z and make a decision based on only part of the information.