EULA's are generally valid, even though you explicitly agree to them after you buy/download the software. The reason: they are the same for every user, and are thus general terms of business. There are of course a few restrictions: general terms of business must be legibly available before the sale/download. So a shrink-wrap license (which is not available before the sale/download) is not legally binding.
Not only must they be legibly available, either the product itself or the party selling it to you must actively inform you that there is a general terms of business applicable to the product. So when you go to the shop and pick up a copy of Vista, the click-through EULA you need to accept to install isn't worth anything unless either the box or the sales clerk made its contents available to you before or at the moment of purchase.
Unfortunately this doesn't allow you to just keep using the product while not adhering to the EULA. In a situation like this you simply have the right to cancel the sale and demand a full refund, so we all still get to collectively swallow EA's latest legal shite if we want to play Spore.
You sir, are so far from having a clue what you're talking about that if you only take a few more steps backwards, you'll come full circle and stumble ass-first into enlightenment.
Either that, or you work for Microsoft, in which case you're getting paid to troll Slashdot. Sounds like a cushy job.
Read the article. PACER was specifically giving the documents out for free via the library. He didn't circumvent anything, just made very efficient use of a perfectly legal process using perfectly legal means.
Oh, come on. Just because there's free candy on the drugstore counter doesn't mean you can take all of it with you. It might be *legal*, but it's still wrong.
Honestly, if he wanted to help redistribute the whole thing, why not get in touch with them and ask for a DVD with the lot on it instead?
DCMA? What's that? Oh wait, some silly law they have across that big body of water in that country that thinks it's the center of the universe...
As for copyright...where did the OP say he was gonna copy anything?
Re:Time scales don't jive with the rest of the SGv
on
Stargate Universe
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· Score: 1
The ship has been traveling for 100,000 years, so you have to use Ancient technology from Atlantis minus 90,000 years. So, that's the equivalent of pushing the human race from space-flight back to before the Clovis Point culture.
So it's Ancient tech, but to compensate it's also ancient...this series is gonna be confusing:/
Two of the tenets of that book were (a) all volunteer armed forces; (b) everyone who volunteered for combat service, and served, got to vote. No exceptions.
Not everyone who served did combat duty. There were medics, scientists and all the other support roles. The whole "everybody fights" mantra seemed to be restricted to the Mobile Infantry.
What I got from it was that in order to be allowed to steer society, you first had to prove you actually gave a damn by putting in some of your actual blood, sweat and tears.
So we've got a _really smart_ guy we've paid to educate, paid for many years to perform exactly 7 times, paid to direct a "cool" program, and now that we've shelled out all that money, he's investing some of it in hopes of selling us some product we spent years paying him to learn about.
By the way...how do you amass enough cash to personally invest significantly in this kind of endeavor, considering otherwise "normal" governmental salaries in the 70-130k/year range? Or is he primarily a front man - a very smart one - who is helping to get money from others (perhaps old colleagues with strings to government funds?) to pursue this research.
I'm not saying he's not doing interesting, and possibly valuable, research, but I'm not about to give him a free pass just because he's got a doctorate and a handful of mission patches. Now, if he's made a bunch of money doing other things (dot com bubble investor?), and is pursuing this as a purely speculative path, then good for him.
Honestly, you know what the above reads like? I'll summarize it for you:
Whaaaaa! He's a succesful astronaut who spent the better part of his life doing something totally awesome and now gets to spend another part of his life doing yet more totally awesome stuff while I sit here staring at my penis and wondering why it is so tiny. Not fair!
Jealous much?
This guy went up 7 times, each time knowing fully well that there's a pretty decent chance the whole thing would end up in a big-ass ball of flame. Do you also complain about military personnel being schooled and trained on your dime? All they ever do is kill people, this guy has risked his life for the sake of science.
I think most people would agree that they prefer to see ads for things they want to buy, and would prefer not to see ads for stuff they don't want to buy.
Ehmm, isn't this whole article about most people, in fact, not agreeing? Or at least most of the surveyed americans?
You don't need to have special locations with giant underground tanks and tanker trunks to deal with it.
Storage isn't the issue, transport is. It's a lot easier to provide existing gas stations with a big fat electricity pipe and a bunch of charging points that have massive nozzles than it is to overhaul every existing neighbourhood to account for all the extra drain.
Doesn't mean people won't still be recharging at home(or work), but there definitely needs to be infrastructure where an electric car can be filled with juice in a reasonable timeframe.
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
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· Score: 1
The dangers of cheeseburgers are also well known, but I don't hear families whose loved ones die of heart disease feel the need to get on soapboxes when people die of heart disease.
If you lead an otherwise healthy life with reasonable amounts of exercise and good food, a couple cheeseburgers every now and then won't hurt you. Smoking will, even in small amounts.
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
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· Score: 1
The other impact on everyone else is on the medical system - public money is spent to support someone, even if they have smoked - why should my tax dollars be wasted on helping people who are so incredibly stupid?
A great argument against nationalized health care. Once you have other people pay for your health what is to stop any random asshole from dictating what I should eat, whether I exercise enough etc etc. because after all I am wasting his money. How about you spend your money on your health and let me worry about mine.
Second hand smoke on the other hand is a good argument in favor of banning smoking in public areas, as far as it can be scientifically shown to cause real harm to others (i.e. in enclosed or crowded areas) but not in privately owned establishments.
Guess what the countries that don't have their heads stuck up their asses use those massive taxes on cigarettes for?
Heck, if everyone in my country stopped smoking at the same time the healthcare system would collapse overnight:P
In fact, I would say that the most violent teen gang members probably don't have as much access to those violent video games as the suburban kids do. But, they listen to that terrible ganger rap!... so do the suburban kids. In fact, I bet that *violence has nothing to do with 'violent' video games or music*!
Hah, that's what you think!
Whereas what really happens is that gang members are poppin' caps in each other's asses, turning tricks etc. to get enough money to buy Xbox's! That's right folks, you heard it here first, Microsoft is directly responsible for gang related violence.
Now we turn over to our regular correspondent, kdawson, on how Bill Gates' charity fund managing to cure cancer and aids in the same week will be the end of civilization because of overpopulation. K, take it away man!
On the other hand, you could quite easily make a game about attempting to avoid insanity while being in solitary confinement wherein gameplay happens only in your dreams. Or a game about attempting to escape solitary confinement where the prison itself is completely physically simulated and an unknown person visits you after lights-out.
Sounds a bit like Ubik to me. Game was almost as funky as the book:P
I determined it was a memory leak caused from loading saved games. I theorized that it wasn't freeing resources properly on load. How did I do it? By watching VRAM usage in the task manager.
I posted it on the forums, and never got a response - but at least I notified them of a bug, and pinpointed it pretty accurately. You could say that having access to the source would be a boon here, but the truth is a novice non-coder isn't going to be able to fix it even with the source, and FOSS and proprietary software are just as bad at not fixing user reported bugs.
Had Kotor been open source, you wouldn't have been at the mercy of the developers for fixing a bug. Instead, anyone could have ran with it, and actually published what the problem was and what he did to fix it. I reckon that even for you, as a non-coder, that would have been a far more interesting experience than the one you just described. Heck, you might even have opened up the source file for just a peek. malloc(), free(), sizeof() etc really aren't all that complicated once you grasp the concept of what they actually do in the background.
This specious argument has been bandied around by shameless pirates for a long time and it's simply not true. For example, if 90% of users of an application are pirates, the software creator has probably not earned enough from the 10% buyers to cover the cost of creating the software, in which case, it is theft. Did you stupid pirates think for one second that the retail price involves more than just the manufacturing cost?
Theft = criminal law Copyright violation = civil law
Notice a difference? Or are you just another armchair (IANA)lawyer who shouts first and thinks later(if at all)?
As for your argument regarding 90% of the software's users being pirates...how many of these pirates would have actually bought the software if there was no way to pirate it? Without that particular figure your example is useless.
That's why we don't code in MS Word and do excel spreadsheets in machine language within emacs.
True. Instead I get to enjoy gems like "a formula in a combined cell can't refer to a cell in another worksheet". Why the fuck not, dear microsoft? What is a combined cell except the value of the cell in the top left displayed in a slightly different way? Why? WHYYYYYYYYY?
Say I run a commercial site that gets libelous/spam/shock site/racist comments (that have been put there by spambots, people with vendettas, b-tards, whatever) that drive away the customers that use SideWiki. Then what?
Rubber duckies have "RISK OF DEATH" labels on them now too. All thanks to kindly Nannie State.
Sure, sure, keep blaming the "Nannie" state. God forbid we point any fingers at the kind innocent people known as, what was that word again? Oh yes, the electorate.
Step 1. Stop being retards. Step 2. Stop electing retards.
I believe the term is "entrepreneur" which (if taken literally) is French for burglar (one who enters and takes).
Might I suggest you stop "believing" stuff and just look it up instead? There's references online going as far back as the 13th century where the word is used for someone who organises thing, often in the context of public works. The same word occurs in a lot of different languages, although oddly the "entre" (lit. "between") has been exchanged for "under". So in english we have the undertaker(different meaning), but the verb "to undertake" is quite close to the spot. In dutch we have the "ondernemer", in german the "Unternehmer". All of them refer to a person who takes responsibility for a job that needs to be done, often related to construction work. The economic meaning of someone who is in charge of a company developed later.
Tachyon - Beyond the Frontier had both flight models as well, where you could hold down a button to keep your current momentum but turn the ship in the right direction. Was used a lot to take out hardpoints on larger ships. It also had massive ships shooting lasery death everywhere that would rip you to pieces if you came anywhere near them:P
Slashdot Mirror
EULA's are generally valid, even though you explicitly agree to them after you buy/download the software. The reason: they are the same for every user, and are thus general terms of business. There are of course a few restrictions: general terms of business must be legibly available before the sale/download. So a shrink-wrap license (which is not available before the sale/download) is not legally binding.
Not only must they be legibly available, either the product itself or the party selling it to you must actively inform you that there is a general terms of business applicable to the product. So when you go to the shop and pick up a copy of Vista, the click-through EULA you need to accept to install isn't worth anything unless either the box or the sales clerk made its contents available to you before or at the moment of purchase.
Unfortunately this doesn't allow you to just keep using the product while not adhering to the EULA. In a situation like this you simply have the right to cancel the sale and demand a full refund, so we all still get to collectively swallow EA's latest legal shite if we want to play Spore.
Dutch wiki article that links to some of the relevant laws.
What's still unclear is the game you and the movie are expected to play, but I think it's one that involves paying large amounts of money.
And the only way to win is not to play. Which reminds me, where's my DVD with the uncut director's version de luxe gold edition of Wargames anyway?
You sir, are so far from having a clue what you're talking about that if you only take a few more steps backwards, you'll come full circle and stumble ass-first into enlightenment.
Either that, or you work for Microsoft, in which case you're getting paid to troll Slashdot. Sounds like a cushy job.
Read the article. PACER was specifically giving the documents out for free via the library. He didn't circumvent anything, just made very efficient use of a perfectly legal process using perfectly legal means.
Oh, come on. Just because there's free candy on the drugstore counter doesn't mean you can take all of it with you. It might be *legal*, but it's still wrong.
Honestly, if he wanted to help redistribute the whole thing, why not get in touch with them and ask for a DVD with the lot on it instead?
DCMA? What's that? Oh wait, some silly law they have across that big body of water in that country that thinks it's the center of the universe...
As for copyright...where did the OP say he was gonna copy anything?
The ship has been traveling for 100,000 years, so you have to use Ancient technology from Atlantis minus 90,000 years. So, that's the equivalent of pushing the human race from space-flight back to before the Clovis Point culture.
So it's Ancient tech, but to compensate it's also ancient...this series is gonna be confusing :/
Two of the tenets of that book were (a) all volunteer armed forces; (b) everyone who volunteered for combat service, and served, got to vote. No exceptions.
Not everyone who served did combat duty. There were medics, scientists and all the other support roles. The whole "everybody fights" mantra seemed to be restricted to the Mobile Infantry.
What I got from it was that in order to be allowed to steer society, you first had to prove you actually gave a damn by putting in some of your actual blood, sweat and tears.
So we've got a _really smart_ guy we've paid to educate, paid for many years to perform exactly 7 times, paid to direct a "cool" program, and now that we've shelled out all that money, he's investing some of it in hopes of selling us some product we spent years paying him to learn about.
By the way...how do you amass enough cash to personally invest significantly in this kind of endeavor, considering otherwise "normal" governmental salaries in the 70-130k/year range? Or is he primarily a front man - a very smart one - who is helping to get money from others (perhaps old colleagues with strings to government funds?) to pursue this research.
I'm not saying he's not doing interesting, and possibly valuable, research, but I'm not about to give him a free pass just because he's got a doctorate and a handful of mission patches. Now, if he's made a bunch of money doing other things (dot com bubble investor?), and is pursuing this as a purely speculative path, then good for him.
Honestly, you know what the above reads like? I'll summarize it for you:
Whaaaaa! He's a succesful astronaut who spent the better part of his life doing something totally awesome and now gets to spend another part of his life doing yet more totally awesome stuff while I sit here staring at my penis and wondering why it is so tiny. Not fair!
Jealous much?
This guy went up 7 times, each time knowing fully well that there's a pretty decent chance the whole thing would end up in a big-ass ball of flame. Do you also complain about military personnel being schooled and trained on your dime? All they ever do is kill people, this guy has risked his life for the sake of science.
Because she's a Trekkie with a map of Middle Earth on the living room wall.
God, I *wish* I was going for a funny mod...
Judging from past experiences...they'll give him a pat on the back for a job well done. This *is* the Eve universe, after all... :-)
Also, protip: nobody cares about the secretary's daughter.
Ehmm, she just won a cheerleading award. Speak for yourself, will you?
Btw..pics or it didn't happen.
I think most people would agree that they prefer to see ads for things they want to buy, and would prefer not to see ads for stuff they don't want to buy.
Ehmm, isn't this whole article about most people, in fact, not agreeing? Or at least most of the surveyed americans?
You don't need to have special locations with giant underground tanks and tanker trunks to deal with it.
Storage isn't the issue, transport is. It's a lot easier to provide existing gas stations with a big fat electricity pipe and a bunch of charging points that have massive nozzles than it is to overhaul every existing neighbourhood to account for all the extra drain.
Doesn't mean people won't still be recharging at home(or work), but there definitely needs to be infrastructure where an electric car can be filled with juice in a reasonable timeframe.
The dangers of cheeseburgers are also well known, but I don't hear families whose loved ones die of heart disease feel the need to get on soapboxes when people die of heart disease.
If you lead an otherwise healthy life with reasonable amounts of exercise and good food, a couple cheeseburgers every now and then won't hurt you. Smoking will, even in small amounts.
The other impact on everyone else is on the medical system - public money is spent to support someone, even if they have smoked - why should my tax dollars be wasted on helping people who are so incredibly stupid?
A great argument against nationalized health care. Once you have other people pay for your health what is to stop any random asshole from dictating what I should eat, whether I exercise enough etc etc. because after all I am wasting his money. How about you spend your money on your health and let me worry about mine.
Second hand smoke on the other hand is a good argument in favor of banning smoking in public areas, as far as it can be scientifically shown to cause real harm to others (i.e. in enclosed or crowded areas) but not in privately owned establishments.
Guess what the countries that don't have their heads stuck up their asses use those massive taxes on cigarettes for?
Heck, if everyone in my country stopped smoking at the same time the healthcare system would collapse overnight :P
*lights up*
In fact, I would say that the most violent teen gang members probably don't have as much access to those violent video games as the suburban kids do. But, they listen to that terrible ganger rap! ... so do the suburban kids. In fact, I bet that *violence has nothing to do with 'violent' video games or music*!
Hah, that's what you think!
Whereas what really happens is that gang members are poppin' caps in each other's asses, turning tricks etc. to get enough money to buy Xbox's! That's right folks, you heard it here first, Microsoft is directly responsible for gang related violence.
Now we turn over to our regular correspondent, kdawson, on how Bill Gates' charity fund managing to cure cancer and aids in the same week will be the end of civilization because of overpopulation. K, take it away man!
On the other hand, you could quite easily make a game about attempting to avoid insanity while being in solitary confinement wherein gameplay happens only in your dreams. Or a game about attempting to escape solitary confinement where the prison itself is completely physically simulated and an unknown person visits you after lights-out.
Sounds a bit like Ubik to me. Game was almost as funky as the book :P
I determined it was a memory leak caused from loading saved games. I theorized that it wasn't freeing resources properly on load. How did I do it? By watching VRAM usage in the task manager.
I posted it on the forums, and never got a response - but at least I notified them of a bug, and pinpointed it pretty accurately. You could say that having access to the source would be a boon here, but the truth is a novice non-coder isn't going to be able to fix it even with the source, and FOSS and proprietary software are just as bad at not fixing user reported bugs.
Had Kotor been open source, you wouldn't have been at the mercy of the developers for fixing a bug. Instead, anyone could have ran with it, and actually published what the problem was and what he did to fix it. I reckon that even for you, as a non-coder, that would have been a far more interesting experience than the one you just described. Heck, you might even have opened up the source file for just a peek. malloc(), free(), sizeof() etc really aren't all that complicated once you grasp the concept of what they actually do in the background.
This specious argument has been bandied around by shameless pirates for a long time and it's simply not true. For example, if 90% of users of an application are pirates, the software creator has probably not earned enough from the 10% buyers to cover the cost of creating the software, in which case, it is theft. Did you stupid pirates think for one second that the retail price involves more than just the manufacturing cost?
Theft = criminal law
Copyright violation = civil law
Notice a difference? Or are you just another armchair (IANA)lawyer who shouts first and thinks later(if at all)?
As for your argument regarding 90% of the software's users being pirates...how many of these pirates would have actually bought the software if there was no way to pirate it? Without that particular figure your example is useless.
That's why we don't code in MS Word and do excel spreadsheets in machine language within emacs.
True. Instead I get to enjoy gems like "a formula in a combined cell can't refer to a cell in another worksheet". Why the fuck not, dear microsoft? What is a combined cell except the value of the cell in the top left displayed in a slightly different way? Why? WHYYYYYYYYY?
Say I run a commercial site that gets libelous/spam/shock site/racist comments (that have been put there by spambots, people with vendettas, b-tards, whatever) that drive away the customers that use SideWiki. Then what?
Tough cookies. Free speech's a bitch sometimes.
Rubber duckies have "RISK OF DEATH" labels on them now too. All thanks to kindly Nannie State.
Sure, sure, keep blaming the "Nannie" state. God forbid we point any fingers at the kind innocent people known as, what was that word again? Oh yes, the electorate.
Step 1. Stop being retards.
Step 2. Stop electing retards.
I believe the term is "entrepreneur" which (if taken literally) is French for burglar (one who enters and takes).
Might I suggest you stop "believing" stuff and just look it up instead? There's references online going as far back as the 13th century where the word is used for someone who organises thing, often in the context of public works. The same word occurs in a lot of different languages, although oddly the "entre" (lit. "between") has been exchanged for "under". So in english we have the undertaker(different meaning), but the verb "to undertake" is quite close to the spot. In dutch we have the "ondernemer", in german the "Unternehmer". All of them refer to a person who takes responsibility for a job that needs to be done, often related to construction work. The economic meaning of someone who is in charge of a company developed later.
wiki link
That's ok. We'll just watch as they "USA! USA!" themselves into irrelevance.
Now, where did I put those Chinese of Dummies books? Time to prep for the next global overlord.
Tachyon - Beyond the Frontier had both flight models as well, where you could hold down a button to keep your current momentum but turn the ship in the right direction. Was used a lot to take out hardpoints on larger ships. It also had massive ships shooting lasery death everywhere that would rip you to pieces if you came anywhere near them :P