...run by capitalists who one would assume would be sympathetic to any anti-Communist sentiments they might express, and who won't sell them out to their government to make a buck, or for them to not be under that delusion?
Delusion. The key word is delusion. They need to learn that while communism is ready to sacrifice people for the sake of crazy idea, at the same time, the capitalists are ready to sacrifice people for the sake of profits.
So... you have to be a lawyer to actually see it, it seems.
The money you pay is your consideration.
Definitely. In the contract of sale, that you have entered with some shop that sold you nice shiny box with the CD inside. Nothing to do with the EULA.
The software (or access rights thereto) they provide is theirs.
Am I so much mistaken in believing that possession of original (i.e. not couterfeit) copy (shiny box with shiny CD) is the entitlement to use of the software contained there?
I see EULA as extortion, since the user has some rights implicit in the ownership of a copy of software.
And could they turn away a plane carrying somebody without a visa?
Sure.
More likely, either the check-in agent or the border control at the airport you are trying to leave from will not let you on the plane.
Also, it's unlikely to turn away the plane (due to some logistical problems, like the limited amount of fuel caried). Rather, anyone not having visa or any required papers would be detained at destination airport and deported. The same happens if one has the visa but the immigration official decides that he's not to be let in anyway.
Yes. They can refuse to give anyone a visa, no special reason needed.
In most cases they will give you some explanation. Not that it has to be sensible or fair. "We don't like your kind in our country" is possible explanation.
I don't think the USSR ever claimed to be a beacon of freedom and democracy for all the world to emulate.
Oh, they did. Many times, and at length. Usually accompanied these propaganda pieces with "investigative journalism" about evil imperialist US govt that persecutes blacks, the poor and the world in general.
On paper, Soviet citizens had as much freedoms as US citizens. Too bad no one in the KGB read Soviet constitution... surely if they did, they would not do many bad things.
As the old joke goes: Q: What's the difference between US and USSR? A: In USSR, the constitution guarantees the freedom of speech. In US, the freedom after the speech.
or
Q: (as above) A: Not much. Any US citizen can criticize US president at will. Any Soviet citizen can also criticize US president whenever he feels like.
This is so you won't be able to find these secret underground FEMA bases where captured aliens commence genetic experiments on abducted redneck and sheep.
Also, the seven best spots to plant the nukular device in the San Andreas fault to make certain city into an island.
None of the aformentioned technologies were designed with the end-user in mind....said Capt Obvious.
This is business. The point of the business is to extract the money from the customers. MS demonstrates understanding of this principle very clearly.
Everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - has some sort of incompatible, misconfigured, hard-to-use "Rights Management" software/encryption/whatever.
It works for the owners(*). Your opinion is not important here, as you're the sucker here, not anyone important(**).
Here is what I want. [lunatic ravings cut for brevity]
And I want a pony. The point being, I'll sooner have dozen ponies and ninja pirate robot monkeys to guard them than you'll have media corps even considering scheme similar to yours...
(* owners = owners of Imaginary Property rights, not you, obviously). (** from the POV of the promoters of this crap)
By including an application in windows where users are sure to interact with it microsoft essentially fills out the windows blank check with whatever new market they want a monopoly in. That is what is illegal.
No. What was wrong and illegal was not including IE in the system. The monopoly abuse was banning resellers from preloading any other product and making that product the default.
Some large PC makers wanted to put Netscape as the default browser/mail client on the computers they were selling. MS threats made them abandon that idea even though customers were supporting it.
It is AFAIK (and IANAL) to bundle some applications with the system. It is illegal to force people to not use the alternatives.
However, because their representatives are elected and the government employees consider themselves servants instead of power brokers, the "big governments" in those countries aren't locking up political prisoners.
What color is the sky on your planet?
I'm living in one such country. Every little dipshit that manages to get a state position considers *self to be ruler of all. The only limit is another dipshit, one rank up:-(
As for locking up political prisoners... well if someone is not locked up, he's not a prisoner;-) But seriously, one guy now faces jail term for sending funny image criticizing Mr President and his Brother.
Next on their agenda is probably declaring state religion and criminalizing homosexualism. Since it's abomination unto dog or somesuch...
I love ripping dvd movies, I can give a copy to my unemployed friends children with the knowledge that no one has lost out and in fact the total sum of human happiness has increased.
Wrong. WRONG. WRONG!
By giving the illegal copy to the poor kids you have eliminated those kid's need to sell his organs to get cash to buy movies. That way not only will the media corporation have less profit, but also the execs won't have cheap organs to replace their own rotten guts.
See? Everyone loses. Well, everyone that has any importance.
This bollocks has to stop - my genome does not belong to corporation X, the wheel does not belong to corporation Y and plants grown in third world peasants back yards for 5000 years deffinitely do not belong to corporation Z.
Sez you. Those fine corporations, pillars of our economy! - they have enough rabid lawyers to prove in any court, that not only your genome belongs to them, but also your entire earnings, for the whole of your predicted lifetime.
So in practical terms - yes, they own the genomes, wheel, doubleclick, single click whatever...
As for the Chinese... well it will be utter irony, when the country accused of so many bad things will become last defender of some freedoms. It will be "interesting times" indeed.
Money goes into my bank account, why should I have to muck about turning it into cash before I buy things?
Most of the time, plastic is nice and convenient. Unless you want to buy something without leaving traces... All these cashless schemes tend to have tracking as either feature (advertised... rarely to users) or side effect (tracking service not offered but possible).
<tinfoil hat> You can have problems if the transaction logs fall into wrong hands - governement, marketers, etc. I'm not saying about buying anything illegal, some perfectly legal purchases can be construed to be evidence against you, like "ever bought beer? pay double health insurance you alcoholic!" or "bought quran? send this terrorist scum off to gitmo!" or maybe "ordered "dvd-backup" software? let's raid his house, he's probably infringing copyright!". </tinfoil>
It seems like they've violated so many of their ethical obligations that they're going to get disbarred.
Good joke!
Serving the rich and powerful by crushing the weaklings, that's their ethics and they do keep faithful to it. Do not expect any serious punishment. There won't be.
Own? No, unTrustworthy Computing removes a key part of the "ownership" concept - control, as you won't be in control of "your" computer. Thus, you won't really own it.
You would think that, but there are some that can't.
Then, maybe, they should not attend the university, just proceed directly to burger flipping/digging holes by the roadside/whatever else job. We'd have less idiots with master's degrees - good thing it would be.
Anyway, you sound more like you read one too many marketing brochure.
Imagine having the entire internet on your desktop, every movie ever filmed, every song ever recorded, every book ever written, etc. in RAM. Along with a sizeable ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SPEECH RECOGNITION that learns as you talk with others in the room, or that can listen to your voicemails FOR YOU, know who they are from and forward the call or hell, have a conversation with the caller. OCR that you just hold the book up to the camera and it instantly reads with 99.999 percent accuracy. Word Processing where WYS really is WYG, with montior DPI getting closer and closer to paper/printer resolution. The thing about it is, you can just throw it all in there and have some sort of filesystem to retrieve it and you can do all these things.
And it does not need electricity - it runs on pure BULLSHIT!
Speech recognition is getting there, OCR also, but AI is nowhere close to being usable for general tasks. Neural nets and all that are great for some specialized uses but that's it. Forget Star Trek style computers that can carry out commands more advanced than "play it", "new paragraph" or the like.
Oh, and the "any movie ever made" is gonna cost you big $$$ or 10 years in Club Fed.
And still the good stuff will be expensive. For close to 15 years a decent, modern computer costs about the same - sure it's faster every year, but all the time, for a relatively high power you pay relatively high price.
Nanotech... we'll see about that in 22nd century. Sorry...
And PC appliance is a nice idea, but will be implemented badly, due to various commercial interests being considered more important as owner interests, RIAA/MPAA style.
These computers need to be more human, and MS is the company that has been doing that all along. Windows has a personality.
Clippy fetishist???
If that's the kind of personality you like, please turn in your geek card and slashdot login, then proceed to your telemarketing cubicle.
Lucent better have a really water tight case, because Microsoft has tons of patents, tons of cash and tons of lawyers.
And Lucent has probably 10x more patents, some quite nasty lawyers and hellish thirst for cash. Lucent still has some quite fundamental stuff from Bell Labs and old AT&T - I wouldn't be suprised it they had prior art for most of MS patents.
So Microsoft better be forthcoming with some offers.
Long long ago, when 9600 bps modems were considered lightning-fast there were some guys with similar type of claim. They even released the software! Too bad that the software used to compress data with some typical algorithm, write it into hidden file and pretend small file with details where data is hidden was the actual archive.
Or like this company that promised to make Windoze memory bigger with on-the-fly realtime compression, only to be later found to simply increase swapfile.
Well, maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be compressed with this new invention to fit on one floppy;-)
Slashdot Mirror
...run by capitalists who one would assume would be sympathetic to any anti-Communist sentiments they might express, and who won't sell them out to their government to make a buck, or for them to not be under that delusion?
Delusion. The key word is delusion. They need to learn that while communism is ready to sacrifice people for the sake of crazy idea, at the same time, the capitalists are ready to sacrifice people for the sake of profits.
It's sad, but that's reality.
Which is why the law should define official text, just like cigarette warnings are prescribed. Also the minimum size requirements.
Padlock? You want them to get out that easily?
I say weld these steel doors shut and dump few (or not so few) tons of fresh concrete on the top.
And put some fence around the place, marked "Nuclear Waste Dump".
That should do it.
Of course there is consideration in EULAs.
So... you have to be a lawyer to actually see it, it seems.
The money you pay is your consideration.
Definitely. In the contract of sale, that you have entered with some shop that sold you nice shiny box with the CD inside. Nothing to do with the EULA.
The software (or access rights thereto) they provide is theirs.
Am I so much mistaken in believing that possession of original (i.e. not couterfeit) copy (shiny box with shiny CD) is the entitlement to use of the software contained there?
I see EULA as extortion, since the user has some rights implicit in the ownership of a copy of software.
More likely, either the check-in agent or the border control at the airport you are trying to leave from will not let you on the plane.
Also, it's unlikely to turn away the plane (due to some logistical problems, like the limited amount of fuel caried). Rather, anyone not having visa or any required papers would be detained at destination airport and deported. The same happens if one has the visa but the immigration official decides that he's not to be let in anyway.
Yes. They can refuse to give anyone a visa, no special reason needed.
In most cases they will give you some explanation. Not that it has to be sensible or fair. "We don't like your kind in our country" is possible explanation.
Been done.
In Poland, when you go to the hotel in typical vacation resort, you have to pay "climate tax" - for being able to breathe the fine air of the place.
What was that place called... My Lai I think. Go read up on killology and Milgram experiment.
Also, even if they would not fall for psy-ops, they will fire if attacked. Just send few provocators into the crowd...
I don't think the USSR ever claimed to be a beacon of freedom and democracy for all the world to emulate.
Oh, they did. Many times, and at length. Usually accompanied these propaganda pieces with "investigative journalism" about evil imperialist US govt that persecutes blacks, the poor and the world in general.
On paper, Soviet citizens had as much freedoms as US citizens. Too bad no one in the KGB read Soviet constitution... surely if they did, they would not do many bad things.
As the old joke goes:
Q: What's the difference between US and USSR?
A: In USSR, the constitution guarantees the freedom of speech. In US, the freedom after the speech.
or
Q: (as above)
A: Not much. Any US citizen can criticize US president at will. Any Soviet citizen can also criticize US president whenever he feels like.
This is so you won't be able to find these secret underground FEMA bases where captured aliens commence genetic experiments on abducted redneck and sheep.
Also, the seven best spots to plant the nukular device in the San Andreas fault to make certain city into an island.
None of the aformentioned technologies were designed with the end-user in mind. ...said Capt Obvious.
This is business. The point of the business is to extract the money from the customers. MS demonstrates understanding of this principle very clearly.
Everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - has some sort of incompatible, misconfigured, hard-to-use "Rights Management" software/encryption/whatever.
It works for the owners(*). Your opinion is not important here, as you're the sucker here, not anyone important(**).
Here is what I want. [lunatic ravings cut for brevity]
And I want a pony.
The point being, I'll sooner have dozen ponies and ninja pirate robot monkeys to guard them than you'll have media corps even considering scheme similar to yours...
(* owners = owners of Imaginary Property rights, not you, obviously).
(** from the POV of the promoters of this crap)
I wholeheartedly support this. A law that outlaws Perl is good by definition.
By including an application in windows where users are sure to interact with it microsoft essentially fills out the windows blank check with whatever new market they want a monopoly in. That is what is illegal.
No. What was wrong and illegal was not including IE in the system. The monopoly abuse was banning resellers from preloading any other product and making that product the default.
Some large PC makers wanted to put Netscape as the default browser/mail client on the computers they were selling. MS threats made them abandon that idea even though customers were supporting it.
It is AFAIK (and IANAL) to bundle some applications with the system. It is illegal to force people to not use the alternatives.
However, because their representatives are elected and the government employees consider themselves servants instead of power brokers, the "big governments" in those countries aren't locking up political prisoners.
:-(
;-) But seriously, one guy now faces jail term for sending funny image criticizing Mr President and his Brother.
What color is the sky on your planet?
I'm living in one such country. Every little dipshit that manages to get a state position considers *self to be ruler of all. The only limit is another dipshit, one rank up
As for locking up political prisoners... well if someone is not locked up, he's not a prisoner
Next on their agenda is probably declaring state religion and criminalizing homosexualism. Since it's abomination unto dog or somesuch...
I love ripping dvd movies, I can give a copy to my unemployed friends children with the knowledge that no one has lost out and in fact the total sum of human happiness has increased.
Wrong. WRONG. WRONG!
By giving the illegal copy to the poor kids you have eliminated those kid's need to sell his organs to get cash to buy movies. That way not only will the media corporation have less profit, but also the execs won't have cheap organs to replace their own rotten guts.
See? Everyone loses. Well, everyone that has any importance.
This bollocks has to stop - my genome does not belong to corporation X, the wheel does not belong to corporation Y and plants grown in third world peasants back yards for 5000 years deffinitely do not belong to corporation Z.
Sez you. Those fine corporations, pillars of our economy! - they have enough rabid lawyers to prove in any court, that not only your genome belongs to them, but also your entire earnings, for the whole of your predicted lifetime.
So in practical terms - yes, they own the genomes, wheel, doubleclick, single click whatever...
As for the Chinese... well it will be utter irony, when the country accused of so many bad things will become last defender of some freedoms. It will be "interesting times" indeed.
Money goes into my bank account, why should I have to muck about turning it into cash before I buy things?
Most of the time, plastic is nice and convenient. Unless you want to buy something without leaving traces... All these cashless schemes tend to have tracking as either feature (advertised... rarely to users) or side effect (tracking service not offered but possible).
<tinfoil hat>
You can have problems if the transaction logs fall into wrong hands - governement, marketers, etc. I'm not saying about buying anything illegal, some perfectly legal purchases can be construed to be evidence against you, like "ever bought beer? pay double health insurance you alcoholic!" or "bought quran? send this terrorist scum off to gitmo!" or maybe "ordered "dvd-backup" software? let's raid his house, he's probably infringing copyright!".
</tinfoil>
It seems like they've violated so many of their ethical obligations that they're going to get disbarred.
Good joke!
Serving the rich and powerful by crushing the weaklings, that's their ethics and they do keep faithful to it. Do not expect any serious punishment. There won't be.
Own? No, unTrustworthy Computing removes a key part of the "ownership" concept - control, as you won't be in control of "your" computer. Thus, you won't really own it.
You would think that, but there are some that can't.
Then, maybe, they should not attend the university, just proceed directly to burger flipping/digging holes by the roadside/whatever else job. We'd have less idiots with master's degrees - good thing it would be.
You don't even have to go that low. Make them 5 bucks and you already have a deal. 5 bucks, no DRM and, hell, why should anyone DL movies anymore?
;-)
There is still a matter of some movies not being availalbe in some parts of the world or being delayed for months or worse.
Still, at that price even the worst hollycrap seems interesting
Please, *please* don't do that unless you're intent on looking like a supergeek from 1997. Brrr. You've got pockets, use them.
Mmmmmm... freshly crushed cellphone... the crunchy goodness!
You can put yours wherever you like, I'll put mine where it's convenient for me.
I sound like fucking Cringley.
Bleargh...
Anyway, you sound more like you read one too many marketing brochure.
Imagine having the entire internet on your desktop, every movie ever filmed, every song ever recorded, every book ever written, etc. in RAM. Along with a sizeable ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SPEECH RECOGNITION that learns as you talk with others in the room, or that can listen to your voicemails FOR YOU, know who they are from and forward the call or hell, have a conversation with the caller. OCR that you just hold the book up to the camera and it instantly reads with 99.999 percent accuracy. Word Processing where WYS really is WYG, with montior DPI getting closer and closer to paper/printer resolution. The thing about it is, you can just throw it all in there and have some sort of filesystem to retrieve it and you can do all these things.
And it does not need electricity - it runs on pure BULLSHIT!
Speech recognition is getting there, OCR also, but AI is nowhere close to being usable for general tasks. Neural nets and all that are great for some specialized uses but that's it. Forget Star Trek style computers that can carry out commands more advanced than "play it", "new paragraph" or the like.
Oh, and the "any movie ever made" is gonna cost you big $$$ or 10 years in Club Fed.
And still the good stuff will be expensive. For close to 15 years a decent, modern computer costs about the same - sure it's faster every year, but all the time, for a relatively high power you pay relatively high price.
Nanotech... we'll see about that in 22nd century. Sorry...
And PC appliance is a nice idea, but will be implemented badly, due to various commercial interests being considered more important as owner interests, RIAA/MPAA style.
These computers need to be more human, and MS is the company that has been doing that all along. Windows has a personality.
Clippy fetishist???
If that's the kind of personality you like, please turn in your geek card and slashdot login, then proceed to your telemarketing cubicle.
Yeah, it's no problem today. But it was a serious problem few years ago.
Not to mention, that circumventing the crappy CSS DRM is illegal in US. If you play DVD on Linux, you are criminal!
Lucent better have a really water tight case, because Microsoft has tons of patents, tons of cash and tons of lawyers.
And Lucent has probably 10x more patents, some quite nasty lawyers and hellish thirst for cash. Lucent still has some quite fundamental stuff from Bell Labs and old AT&T - I wouldn't be suprised it they had prior art for most of MS patents.
So Microsoft better be forthcoming with some offers.
Long long ago, when 9600 bps modems were considered lightning-fast there were some guys with similar type of claim. They even released the software! Too bad that the software used to compress data with some typical algorithm, write it into hidden file and pretend small file with details where data is hidden was the actual archive.
Or like this company that promised to make Windoze memory bigger with on-the-fly realtime compression, only to be later found to simply increase swapfile.
Well, maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be compressed with this new invention to fit on one floppy
I think it comes from the Imaginary Property concept.
Stop treating ideas as property, notice that bits are just impulses - and the idiocy will disappear.
Ha ha like it would happen...