If they would just structure the form like a flowchart or indented program, and use real variable names instead of line numbers, it would all be much easier for everyone to understand. I disagree. You need to get out and deal with non-programmers more...
I can't see how it can be binding, because there's no record of a signature (not even a digital one). There's no recorded date, or identity of who clicked the mouse.
IANAL, but assuming the software vendor can prove the software cannot be installed without clicking the mouse, I doubt that the date matters. So do you think you can convince the court that some unauthorized person snuck in and installed the software, and you were too dumb to wonder how it got there?
You've got a much better case arguing that the EULA is unintellible to layman (and unclear to lawyers also), that it does not make it clear that it _is_ a legal contract and you ought to get a lawyer to review it and that you have the right to refuse the contract and get a full refund if you don't like it, that requiring a lawyer just to buy game software is unreasonable, and that the EULA terms violate several clauses of the UCC as implemented in your state. If you can get a judge that isn't in corporate pockets...
The reality is, this stuff is written for other lawyers. Why? Because when there is a disagreement, lawyers and judges (higher up lawyers) will be making arguments/decisions pertaining to the confilict.
But it's supposed to be a contract that the user accepts by clicking the "OK". Making a contract requires an exchange of considerations and a "meeting of minds" about the terms. If the terms are unintelligible to the user, it should be void. Or it should very clearly say, "if you don't understand this, you should get a lawyer to review it before going on, since by clicking "OK" you are signing a legal contract."
Worse, with some of these EULA's, I don't think my lawyer could understand it, I don't think the local district court judge would even try to understand it, I'm sure there's at least one Justice of the Supreme Court that cannot understand it, and I seriously doubt the lawyer who wrote it understands it!
There are three separate issues in tax forms. One is that most of the public school teachers teaching math don't really understand it, so most Americans are pretty much innumerate. If your mind freezes up every time you see more than three addition or subtraction operations, there isn't much chance of you understanding any tax form no matter how simple.
Second, if you are numerate, the IRS forms are generally as clear as they can make it while following the laws that a bunch of damned lawyers in Congress wrote. But those laws are generally written to obscure the point rather than to clarify it -- your congressman doesn't want to make it too clear that he designed a particular deduction so that only one corporation in the whole US can use it...
Third, there are a lot of people who do understand the intent of the forms and tax laws, but want to know how much cheating they can get away with. The exact limits of things like legitimate business travel expenses are hard to define, but many people are way over any reasonable line. You know -- fly to Hawaii, have a five minute business discussion, stay a week, deduct it all as business expenses. If your question is, can I get busted for that -- I sure hope so!
[as long as their lawyers are decent, they can defend the 'comprehensibility' aspect far more easily than a user can defend not bothering to even try]
I wonder about that. Actual court decisions on EULA's have been pretty rare so far, and far from one-sided except when the infringer was pretty clearly infringing more than just the EULA.
The real question is, what does it take to get your defense against a claimed EULA infringement (breach of contract would be the actual allegation, I suppose) in front of a jury. Once the jury gets the idea that the software vendor used 3,000 words to say that you don't actually own the software you paid for, I don't have much doubt as to the verdict.
Grandma couldn't possibly install Redhat on her PC.
But she doesn't install Windows either. On a new computer, it's pre-installed and you probably don't even get a true Windows CD. On an older computer, in my experience about half the time the installation will run nice and troublefree, the other half the time you get problems that no naive user is going to get past, and since MS has put more effort into pretending that this won't happen than into making programs accurately report errors and indexing their Knowledge Base, it's often fairly hard for even a techie to find out what's going wrong and how to correct it.
Redhat and other Linux providers are honest about their installation process: you are going to have to learn what hardware you have, learn a little about Linux, and make some intelligent choices during the installation. If that scares you off, you'll ultimately need a sys admin anyhow -- no matter what software you use.
What's a bit peculiar about this piece is that it's written by Jack Gannsle, who has worked as an embedded programmer since the 4004 first hit the open market, 30 or 31 years. He must be about 50, but I haven't seen anything in his columns that indicate he himself is quitting, and he's certainly not burning out. Or for another example, I'm 48, and I'm going to keep right on working as an engineer until they carry me out of here.
However, Gannsle does mix coding with managing a consulting business, teaching, and writing that column. Working for yourself avoids the problem of salary ceilings (not many managers are smart enough to pay their best workers more than their own salaries), and of nitwits that won't hire anyone over 40. Of course, self-employment is only for those that can handle a little sales and management also. For myself, I tried management when I was a sergeant, and you can't pay me enough to try it again -- and I'm too honest for sales, unless business schools wise up and start teaching the future managers to identify and avoid bullshitters...
The other thing is to vary the job a little. If you basically write the same program over and over, you should get very good at it, but either you'll go nuts from boredom, or your brain will ossify and you won't be able to handle it when the job changes. There are lots of ways to do this -- just make sure to pick at least one and follow through with it.
Not that HDs are that expensive these days anyway.
How about a stripped down version that doesn't need a rotating disk? You can get that with WinCE (the old version of XP embedded) -- one of my customers has it running in 64M of flash memory, and using less than half the space. That includes the application program for a touch screen voting system. OTOH, don't expect to do anything else on that machine -- surfing the web, for instance, is not only unneeded, but would be a security risk...
As for the law, there was once a time when car dealers could only represent one company. A Buick dealer might also sell Chevys and Cadillacs, but could not sell Fords or Volkswagens or else GM would yank out all it's cars. But back in the 60's (IIRC) GM, Ford, and Chrysler together made more than 90% of all cars sold in the USA, and a court decided that was close enough to a monopoly. They ordered that car dealers be allowed to pick and choose the lines they sold from more than one manufacturer, and now we've got dealers that sell Saturn (GM) and Toyota sedans together with Chevy (GM) and Jeep (Chrysler) trucks. Never mind that the "big three" haven't been so dominant ever since 1973.
As for Microsoft, about six years ago they were in the middle of a case about bundling Explorer with the OS. This must have been about when they CHOSE to change the OS design to make it much harder to separate Explorer from Win 98. It's a problem of their own creation, and they did it when they knew that legally they probably shouldn't.
Let's say someone is caught littering, and the judge sentences him to pick up trash. So he shoots off his toe and asks to be let off of the sentence since it's hard to walk. Would you go for that?
At least there's one bit of good news here -- the Federal government's debt is a hell of a lot bigger than $40 billion, so there's no chance of Microsoft buying up all of that. Yet...
Another interesting pair of figures in the CNN MONEY article: over the last decade, MS has averaged 30.5% annual sales growth and 37% annual earnings growth.
Earnings grow faster than sales when costs don't increase proportionally. That is, here we have evidence that MS isn't using its money to hire more programmers, software testers, or tech support.
But the car itself IS sold to you with all the bits. Anyone know much about the customized van business? Are they buying the most basic vans and stripping out the factory seats, radio, etc., or do the manufacturers sell a van "shell"?
Another analogy: airplanes are often sold without engines. There are various standard motor mounts for various sizes, and you can buy any engine that has been approved for your plane. I'm sure Boeing sells engines to fit its airplanes, but it's just as easy to buy other engines. Some of the top aircraft engine makers (Rolls-Royce, for instance) have never been in the airframe business at all.
Actually, most of these companies don't profit from selling the tools to match their odd fastener heads, and I don't know of any case where a car manufacturer owns the patents for fasteners and won't license anyone else to make drivers for them. (Of course, keeping the fastener design secret is out of the question -- any machinist can measure it and duplicate it, so if the inventor wants to keep control he'd better patent it, measurements and all. This is quite unlike unpublished and copyright-protected interfaces in software.)
The odd heads are there for two reasons -- they work better with powered screwdrivers on the assembly line than philips or slotted heads, and they reduce the tendency of customers to tamper with stuff they don't understand. But it is no problem at all for professional mechanics to get the tools (the Stanley Tools man comes around to auto shops once a week in a van with tools for just about everything), and the rest of us just have to put in a little more effort to find the thing in the McMaster-Carr catalog.
Contrast that with trying to find out how to interface to a Microsoft product...
IIRC, the federal law is that they can charge if the order will be shipped within 30 days. I don't quite see the logic behind that -- since 99% of mail & internet order businesses don't control the manufacturing of their products, the only way they can be _sure_ they'll be able to ship in 30 days is if the product is already in their hands -- so they'll be shipping immediately. If you don't charge until the shipment is in the box, then you don't get into screw-ups like this, or the much more common screw-up of charging the card, then finding out that you're out of stock.
Well, we all know why the law is tilted towards businesses over consumers. Consumers just vote, businesses pay b^r^i^b^e^s^campaign contributions. What I don't understand is why so many businesses adopt policies sure to result in p-o-ed customers? Now and then you can inflate the profits for a quarter by screwing your customers, go through a merger based on the inflated stock price, and then try to repeat the process under a new name, but how many times can this work?
Re:Disclaimer? - Not Necessary
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Worst Buy
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· Score: 2
Imagine if I'm setting up a web site for a car dealership and I accidently put down "$147.50" instead of "$14,750.00" for a brand new car. Yes, but if I walk in and hand you $147.50 for the new Ford Escort AND YOU TAKE IT, you just made a sale. I made an offer, and you accepted it. That's all that is needed to create a contract. Hand me the keys or you're in breach...
Since BB were taking the orders, and charging the credit cards in many cases, same principle.
Now, I wouldn't expect to actually get the car unless the business owner himself took the money and signed a receipt, because $147.50 is so low for a new car that it's obviously an error and not a proper "exchange of consideration", and the car dealer could reasonably claim that a salesman who made that deal exceeded his authority. However, considering the deep discounts we often see in web and mail order stores, $129 for a $329 or $400 card is not clearly an error or lack of consideration, and Best Buy would have a hell of a job claiming that their sales people weren't authorized to sell the card at this price after their computers accepted the order and billed the credit card. The only way they could get away with this is if people don't find it worthwhile taking them to court. And that doesn't work when enough people join the class action suit.
Although it might be more fun for each of those several thousand people to go into small claims court instead, forcing bestbuy.com to send a representative to each and every hearing...
Some posts have claimed that BB has made pricing "errors" like this in their printed and online catalogs quite often. That would make a case that the "errors" are indeed intentional, and also subject BB to prosecution for bait and switch.
This certainly looks like a system oriented to tourists, with one exception: if that map is accurate, IT DOESN'T GO ALL THE WAY TO THE AIRPORT. Bring it right to the terminal, have trains every 10 minutes, and make it look clean and safe, and it would be a more attractive way of getting around a strange town than renting a car, not to mention a whole lot cheaper. And I presume it would be faster than waiting for a hotel/casino shuttle bus -- and lets you check out the competition, too.
This won't work in most American cities, but there are special circumstances in Las Vegas. There are a whole lot of people flying in and going to the same few places -- give them a way of reaching those places that's faster than waiting in line at the car rental counter, and how can it fail?
What it won't do so well is serving the local workforce. They're driving in from all over, and you can't get the rail out near more than a tiny fraction of the homes, and nobody seems to be able to run a bus system well enough that people will choose it over their own car... However, if there is a serious problem with commuter congestion and parking downtown, and considering that a large portion of the workforce are going to the casinos and nearby businesses, a _properly designed_ rail could alleviate it. You run it in several directions out into the countryside far enough that traffic isn't congested and there's room for really big parking lots. So casino workers (at least) can drive to the rail, park, and ride, and if it's done well enough they get to work faster as well as avoiding the high price of downtown parking. Other workers with jobs scattered all over can't do this, but at least many of the casino workers and tourists are off the road.
Has any American city actually got any rail system that was built properly and is run properly? My own experience is with the Washington DC system about 15 years ago. It was a nice ride once you got on it, but coming in from Warrenton, VA at rush hour, which appeared to be all day from 5 AM to 10 PM, I would be in bumper to bumper traffic for an hour before I reached the first station, and that parking lot filled up about 6am. And that station was just two or three miles from the job in Alexandria, so I might as well go on past it anyhow. It was a good way to take the family to the Smithsonian and several other touristy places on weekends, but to commute with it you had to get up with the chicken farmers...
Now, if they'd built it 5-10 miles further out as the population out there expanded, and put in enough parking, it would have worked pretty well -- but only for those whose jobs were near the line or downtown, instead of scattered all the way around the beltway. That's assuming that they could have laid on enough trains to handle all the traffic, and kept them as clean as they were on weekends...
Best Buy not only gave a verbal confirmation of the price, they accepted the order and CHARGED IT to the credit card. IANAL, but I can't imagine any twist to law where this _wasn't_ a valid contract. Generally, a sales contract is made when one party makes an offer to buy or sell at a certain price and the other accepts. More generally, contracts are made when there is "a meeting of minds". The advertising wasn't a valid offer (too many ways advertising can get screwed up, OTOH if there are a lot of such "errors" the state AG should conclude that they weren't errors and prosecute for bait-and-switch). The verbal confirmation of price was an offer, although it might not be possible to prove it really happened. But all that doesn't matter, because if the seller didn't make an offer, then placing the order for such and such at $129 was an offer by the _buyer_, and the seller accepted it by taking the order and the money. About the only way out of that is to claim that it is impossible to fulfill the order due to circumstances beyond your control (you don't have stock, and can't get it), and pretty clearly this isn't the case when stores all over the country have the item...
So what is BB's real defense here? Maybe, "there couldn't have been a meeting of minds because we are mindless"?;-)
But is anyone actually putting a RAID array (about the only way you can spend $1K on hard drives nowadays) into their PC just to store music?
True, comparing $/GB it does make economic sense -- if you need >200GB and ignore the _certainty_ that data kept on hard-drive is going to be lost someday...
No, most money _now_ is just bits in bank databases. The McGuffing wouldn't change that, it would just make the physical markers untrustworthy.
Even some fairly primitive societies have similar concepts. On some south pacific island, thousand pound stone wheels are "money". AFAIC, the stones have no more intrinsic value than the little pieces of green paper or database entries we rely on. Since people don't want to roll the stone down to the store, they just leave the stones where they are and transfer the title. It's a non-literate society, so people just _remember_ who that particular stone belongs too. Memory is not a problem -- pre-literates have very good memories, although they also have quite a lot less to remember. Obviously, a high degree of honesty is required to make this work, but this is common in primitive societies -- everyone knows everyone, so if you get a reputation for lying or cheating, everyone is going to insist on cash or trade goods up front, and life gets very difficult.
So anyway, this island is really running on a system of credit, kept in peoples' heads. All the physical stones add to the system is a way to really rub in the consequences of cheating -- if you gave John the sixth stone on the left for a bushel of potatoes and Jim the same stone for a couple of chickens, next time you need groceries you just might have to actually roll a stone around...
Of course, credit systems can be made much harder to cheat by the proper use of technology. Until recently, the primary technology was writing -- your signature on a check or IOU establishing your agreement to transfer credit, or government printing to give a piece of paper a value backed by the government. The McGuffin would nearly obsolete that system, since by the time matching up serial numbers showed that money or a signed check had been duplicated, it might be impossible to uncover the original cheat. But with databases, the internet, and secure encryption, a lot of sales are already being charged to credit cards with no paper used. Electronic money per se hasn't taken off merely because the need isn't yet pressing enough to force people to abandon a 5,000 year old system while it still works.
I guess you're also against arresting someone who's drinking and driving only because they "might" kill someone.
Pedantically, you can arrest someone who's drinking and driving because they are breaking a law, while (depending on the interpretation of some unnecessarily complicated laws) what bnet is doing may or may not be breaking the law now. You can't arrest them because they might break the law later.
But the interesting question is, why is it right to pass a law against drunk driving because they might kill someone later, and wrong to ban something because it might turn into a copyright violation later?
Answer: IRREMEDIABLE HARM. The copyright holder can wait until there is an actual copyright violation, then go to court, shut them down, and also get monetary damages to replace any alleged lost sales. But if a drunk kills someone, no court can bring them back to life. So given that it is easily shown statistically that drunk drivers are far more likely to kill someone than nearly all sober drivers, it is reasonable to stop them when they start weaving around the road, test them, and arrest them if alcohol or other drugs are the cause, rather than waiting for the crash. There are at least two fine lines here that the legislature should consider, how much hazard is too much, and what kind of tactics are acceptable to catch the drunks.
Note that personally I don't much approve of tactics such as waiting near the bar, pulling everyone over for breathalyzer checks, and prosecuting solely on the basis of the blood alcohol content, rather than looking for evidence of impairment first. I and some of my relatives can get pretty drunk at well under the legal BAC limit. (Inherited metabolic peculiarity. I figured that out in 1976 and haven't drunk since, but if I was an idiot and an asshole, I could drive home drunk every night and never get arrested.) Other people can be functioning pretty well when their BAC is high enough to be illegal in any state. Many of them will have faster reflexes drunk than I am when going home after 14 hours at work -- although if they're driving drunk, they're probably reckless too, and fast reflexes don't make reckless driving safe...
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
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GPL's Strength
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· Score: 2
In any sane jurisdiction, using software you have already bought does not require additional permission from the copyright holder.
Commercial software companies contend that, since installing the software typically requires copying it from CD to hard drive, and then running it requires copying it from hard drive to RAM, using software _does_ require additional permission from the copyright holder. In related news, TW-Disney, Inc., announced that, since watching a movie involves making a copy of each frame on the viewer's visual cortex, the entire population of the 1st world is now bound by the EULA contained in a microdot on each CD case, VHS case, movie ticket, or Disney children's book, "By watching this movie or reading this book, you agree never to re-sell this or allow anyone else to view or read it, and you sign all rights to your soul over to TW-Disney, Inc." TW-Disney is filing suit to close all used book stores, libraries, and video rental stores in the world. It refused to say what it plans to do with the souls collected under this EULA, but there is an unconfirmed report that in an upset election, Jehovah, president of Heaven since 4004 BC, has now been replaced by Walt Disney, even though he isn't a resident. Walt Disney is also contesting the recent re-election of Satan as Tyrant of Hell, claiming that demons with pitchforks barred his souls from voting, incinerated ballots in precincts favoring him, and infringed Disney's freedom of speech by holding him head-down in a fiery lake every time he attempted to give his campaign speech. Satan commented, "Hell will be a democracy when you can iceskate on my lava pool."
I agree, in a sane jurisdiction, a sale would be a sale, the copies incidental to normal use of software that was sold shrinkwrapped would be considered implicitly allowed by the sale (that includes hard drive, RAM, and all the backups of the disk image you want to make, as long as you only have one working installation at a time), and the EULA would be ineffective unless agreed to before the sale. So, are there any sane jurisdictions?
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My point was, most people can't comprehend flowcharts either.
If they would just structure the form like a flowchart or indented program, and use real variable names instead of line numbers, it would all be much easier for everyone to understand.
I disagree. You need to get out and deal with non-programmers more...
I can't see how it can be binding, because there's no record of a signature (not even a digital one). There's no recorded date, or identity of who clicked the mouse.
IANAL, but assuming the software vendor can prove the software cannot be installed without clicking the mouse, I doubt that the date matters. So do you think you can convince the court that some unauthorized person snuck in and installed the software, and you were too dumb to wonder how it got there?
You've got a much better case arguing that the EULA is unintellible to layman (and unclear to lawyers also), that it does not make it clear that it _is_ a legal contract and you ought to get a lawyer to review it and that you have the right to refuse the contract and get a full refund if you don't like it, that requiring a lawyer just to buy game software is unreasonable, and that the EULA terms violate several clauses of the UCC as implemented in your state. If you can get a judge that isn't in corporate pockets...
The reality is, this stuff is written for other lawyers. Why? Because when there is a disagreement, lawyers and judges (higher up lawyers) will be making arguments/decisions pertaining to the confilict.
But it's supposed to be a contract that the user accepts by clicking the "OK". Making a contract requires an exchange of considerations and a "meeting of minds" about the terms. If the terms are unintelligible to the user, it should be void. Or it should very clearly say, "if you don't understand this, you should get a lawyer to review it before going on, since by clicking "OK" you are signing a legal contract."
Worse, with some of these EULA's, I don't think my lawyer could understand it, I don't think the local district court judge would even try to understand it, I'm sure there's at least one Justice of the Supreme Court that cannot understand it, and I seriously doubt the lawyer who wrote it understands it!
There are three separate issues in tax forms. One is that most of the public school teachers teaching math don't really understand it, so most Americans are pretty much innumerate. If your mind freezes up every time you see more than three addition or subtraction operations, there isn't much chance of you understanding any tax form no matter how simple.
Second, if you are numerate, the IRS forms are generally as clear as they can make it while following the laws that a bunch of damned lawyers in Congress wrote. But those laws are generally written to obscure the point rather than to clarify it -- your congressman doesn't want to make it too clear that he designed a particular deduction so that only one corporation in the whole US can use it...
Third, there are a lot of people who do understand the intent of the forms and tax laws, but want to know how much cheating they can get away with. The exact limits of things like legitimate business travel expenses are hard to define, but many people are way over any reasonable line. You know -- fly to Hawaii, have a five minute business discussion, stay a week, deduct it all as business expenses. If your question is, can I get busted for that -- I sure hope so!
[as long as their lawyers are decent, they can defend the 'comprehensibility' aspect far more easily than a user can defend not bothering to even try]
I wonder about that. Actual court decisions on EULA's have been pretty rare so far, and far from one-sided except when the infringer was pretty clearly infringing more than just the EULA.
The real question is, what does it take to get your defense against a claimed EULA infringement (breach of contract would be the actual allegation, I suppose) in front of a jury. Once the jury gets the idea that the software vendor used 3,000 words to say that you don't actually own the software you paid for, I don't have much doubt as to the verdict.
Grandma couldn't possibly install Redhat on her PC.
But she doesn't install Windows either. On a new computer, it's pre-installed and you probably don't even get a true Windows CD. On an older computer, in my experience about half the time the installation will run nice and troublefree, the other half the time you get problems that no naive user is going to get past, and since MS has put more effort into pretending that this won't happen than into making programs accurately report errors and indexing their Knowledge Base, it's often fairly hard for even a techie to find out what's going wrong and how to correct it.
Redhat and other Linux providers are honest about their installation process: you are going to have to learn what hardware you have, learn a little about Linux, and make some intelligent choices during the installation. If that scares you off, you'll ultimately need a sys admin anyhow -- no matter what software you use.
What's a bit peculiar about this piece is that it's written by Jack Gannsle, who has worked as an embedded programmer since the 4004 first hit the open market, 30 or 31 years. He must be about 50, but I haven't seen anything in his columns that indicate he himself is quitting, and he's certainly not burning out. Or for another example, I'm 48, and I'm going to keep right on working as an engineer until they carry me out of here.
However, Gannsle does mix coding with managing a consulting business, teaching, and writing that column. Working for yourself avoids the problem of salary ceilings (not many managers are smart enough to pay their best workers more than their own salaries), and of nitwits that won't hire anyone over 40. Of course, self-employment is only for those that can handle a little sales and management also. For myself, I tried management when I was a sergeant, and you can't pay me enough to try it again -- and I'm too honest for sales, unless business schools wise up and start teaching the future managers to identify and avoid bullshitters...
The other thing is to vary the job a little. If you basically write the same program over and over, you should get very good at it, but either you'll go nuts from boredom, or your brain will ossify and you won't be able to handle it when the job changes. There are lots of ways to do this -- just make sure to pick at least one and follow through with it.
But would you want to crawl around in the holes of the Sierpinski sponge to replace modules?
Not that HDs are that expensive these days anyway.
How about a stripped down version that doesn't need a rotating disk? You can get that with WinCE (the old version of XP embedded) -- one of my customers has it running in 64M of flash memory, and using less than half the space. That includes the application program for a touch screen voting system. OTOH, don't expect to do anything else on that machine -- surfing the web, for instance, is not only unneeded, but would be a security risk...
As for the law, there was once a time when car dealers could only represent one company. A Buick dealer might also sell Chevys and Cadillacs, but could not sell Fords or Volkswagens or else GM would yank out all it's cars. But back in the 60's (IIRC) GM, Ford, and Chrysler together made more than 90% of all cars sold in the USA, and a court decided that was close enough to a monopoly. They ordered that car dealers be allowed to pick and choose the lines they sold from more than one manufacturer, and now we've got dealers that sell Saturn (GM) and Toyota sedans together with Chevy (GM) and Jeep (Chrysler) trucks. Never mind that the "big three" haven't been so dominant ever since 1973.
As for Microsoft, about six years ago they were in the middle of a case about bundling Explorer with the OS. This must have been about when they CHOSE to change the OS design to make it much harder to separate Explorer from Win 98. It's a problem of their own creation, and they did it when they knew that legally they probably shouldn't.
Let's say someone is caught littering, and the judge sentences him to pick up trash. So he shoots off his toe and asks to be let off of the sentence since it's hard to walk. Would you go for that?
I wish I could read the article. It's slashdotted.
;-)
Now for the spewing hatred: it must be running IIS.
At least there's one bit of good news here -- the Federal government's debt is a hell of a lot bigger than $40 billion, so there's no chance of Microsoft buying up all of that. Yet...
Another interesting pair of figures in the CNN MONEY article: over the last decade, MS has averaged 30.5% annual sales growth and 37% annual earnings growth.
Earnings grow faster than sales when costs don't increase proportionally. That is, here we have evidence that MS isn't using its money to hire more programmers, software testers, or tech support.
But the car itself IS sold to you with all the bits. Anyone know much about the customized van business? Are they buying the most basic vans and stripping out the factory seats, radio, etc., or do the manufacturers sell a van "shell"?
Another analogy: airplanes are often sold without engines. There are various standard motor mounts for various sizes, and you can buy any engine that has been approved for your plane. I'm sure Boeing sells engines to fit its airplanes, but it's just as easy to buy other engines. Some of the top aircraft engine makers (Rolls-Royce, for instance) have never been in the airframe business at all.
Actually, most of these companies don't profit from selling the tools to match their odd fastener heads, and I don't know of any case where a car manufacturer owns the patents for fasteners and won't license anyone else to make drivers for them. (Of course, keeping the fastener design secret is out of the question -- any machinist can measure it and duplicate it, so if the inventor wants to keep control he'd better patent it, measurements and all. This is quite unlike unpublished and copyright-protected interfaces in software.)
The odd heads are there for two reasons -- they work better with powered screwdrivers on the assembly line than philips or slotted heads, and they reduce the tendency of customers to tamper with stuff they don't understand. But it is no problem at all for professional mechanics to get the tools (the Stanley Tools man comes around to auto shops once a week in a van with tools for just about everything), and the rest of us just have to put in a little more effort to find the thing in the McMaster-Carr catalog.
Contrast that with trying to find out how to interface to a Microsoft product...
where do you draw the line? At a psychosis research tax on Jim Carrey films...
IIRC, the federal law is that they can charge if the order will be shipped within 30 days. I don't quite see the logic behind that -- since 99% of mail & internet order businesses don't control the manufacturing of their products, the only way they can be _sure_ they'll be able to ship in 30 days is if the product is already in their hands -- so they'll be shipping immediately. If you don't charge until the shipment is in the box, then you don't get into screw-ups like this, or the much more common screw-up of charging the card, then finding out that you're out of stock.
Well, we all know why the law is tilted towards businesses over consumers. Consumers just vote, businesses pay b^r^i^b^e^s^campaign contributions. What I don't understand is why so many businesses adopt policies sure to result in p-o-ed customers? Now and then you can inflate the profits for a quarter by screwing your customers, go through a merger based on the inflated stock price, and then try to repeat the process under a new name, but how many times can this work?
Imagine if I'm setting up a web site for a car dealership and I accidently put down "$147.50" instead of "$14,750.00" for a brand new car. Yes, but if I walk in and hand you $147.50 for the new Ford Escort AND YOU TAKE IT, you just made a sale. I made an offer, and you accepted it. That's all that is needed to create a contract. Hand me the keys or you're in breach...
Since BB were taking the orders, and charging the credit cards in many cases, same principle.
Now, I wouldn't expect to actually get the car unless the business owner himself took the money and signed a receipt, because $147.50 is so low for a new car that it's obviously an error and not a proper "exchange of consideration", and the car dealer could reasonably claim that a salesman who made that deal exceeded his authority. However, considering the deep discounts we often see in web and mail order stores, $129 for a $329 or $400 card is not clearly an error or lack of consideration, and Best Buy would have a hell of a job claiming that their sales people weren't authorized to sell the card at this price after their computers accepted the order and billed the credit card. The only way they could get away with this is if people don't find it worthwhile taking them to court. And that doesn't work when enough people join the class action suit.
Although it might be more fun for each of those several thousand people to go into small claims court instead, forcing bestbuy.com to send a representative to each and every hearing...
Some posts have claimed that BB has made pricing "errors" like this in their printed and online catalogs quite often. That would make a case that the "errors" are indeed intentional, and also subject BB to prosecution for bait and switch.
Disclaimer: IANAL, etc.
This certainly looks like a system oriented to tourists, with one exception: if that map is accurate, IT DOESN'T GO ALL THE WAY TO THE AIRPORT. Bring it right to the terminal, have trains every 10 minutes, and make it look clean and safe, and it would be a more attractive way of getting around a strange town than renting a car, not to mention a whole lot cheaper. And I presume it would be faster than waiting for a hotel/casino shuttle bus -- and lets you check out the competition, too.
This won't work in most American cities, but there are special circumstances in Las Vegas. There are a whole lot of people flying in and going to the same few places -- give them a way of reaching those places that's faster than waiting in line at the car rental counter, and how can it fail?
What it won't do so well is serving the local workforce. They're driving in from all over, and you can't get the rail out near more than a tiny fraction of the homes, and nobody seems to be able to run a bus system well enough that people will choose it over their own car... However, if there is a serious problem with commuter congestion and parking downtown, and considering that a large portion of the workforce are going to the casinos and nearby businesses, a _properly designed_ rail could alleviate it. You run it in several directions out into the countryside far enough that traffic isn't congested and there's room for really big parking lots. So casino workers (at least) can drive to the rail, park, and ride, and if it's done well enough they get to work faster as well as avoiding the high price of downtown parking. Other workers with jobs scattered all over can't do this, but at least many of the casino workers and tourists are off the road.
Has any American city actually got any rail system that was built properly and is run properly? My own experience is with the Washington DC system about 15 years ago. It was a nice ride once you got on it, but coming in from Warrenton, VA at rush hour, which appeared to be all day from 5 AM to 10 PM, I would be in bumper to bumper traffic for an hour before I reached the first station, and that parking lot filled up about 6am. And that station was just two or three miles from the job in Alexandria, so I might as well go on past it anyhow. It was a good way to take the family to the Smithsonian and several other touristy places on weekends, but to commute with it you had to get up with the chicken farmers...
Now, if they'd built it 5-10 miles further out as the population out there expanded, and put in enough parking, it would have worked pretty well -- but only for those whose jobs were near the line or downtown, instead of scattered all the way around the beltway. That's assuming that they could have laid on enough trains to handle all the traffic, and kept them as clean as they were on weekends...
Best Buy not only gave a verbal confirmation of the price, they accepted the order and CHARGED IT to the credit card. IANAL, but I can't imagine any twist to law where this _wasn't_ a valid contract. Generally, a sales contract is made when one party makes an offer to buy or sell at a certain price and the other accepts. More generally, contracts are made when there is "a meeting of minds". The advertising wasn't a valid offer (too many ways advertising can get screwed up, OTOH if there are a lot of such "errors" the state AG should conclude that they weren't errors and prosecute for bait-and-switch). The verbal confirmation of price was an offer, although it might not be possible to prove it really happened. But all that doesn't matter, because if the seller didn't make an offer, then placing the order for such and such at $129 was an offer by the _buyer_, and the seller accepted it by taking the order and the money. About the only way out of that is to claim that it is impossible to fulfill the order due to circumstances beyond your control (you don't have stock, and can't get it), and pretty clearly this isn't the case when stores all over the country have the item...
;-)
So what is BB's real defense here? Maybe, "there couldn't have been a meeting of minds because we are mindless"?
But is anyone actually putting a RAID array (about the only way you can spend $1K on hard drives nowadays) into their PC just to store music?
True, comparing $/GB it does make economic sense -- if you need >200GB and ignore the _certainty_ that data kept on hard-drive is going to be lost someday...
No, most money _now_ is just bits in bank databases. The McGuffing wouldn't change that, it would just make the physical markers untrustworthy.
Even some fairly primitive societies have similar concepts. On some south pacific island, thousand pound stone wheels are "money". AFAIC, the stones have no more intrinsic value than the little pieces of green paper or database entries we rely on. Since people don't want to roll the stone down to the store, they just leave the stones where they are and transfer the title. It's a non-literate society, so people just _remember_ who that particular stone belongs too. Memory is not a problem -- pre-literates have very good memories, although they also have quite a lot less to remember. Obviously, a high degree of honesty is required to make this work, but this is common in primitive societies -- everyone knows everyone, so if you get a reputation for lying or cheating, everyone is going to insist on cash or trade goods up front, and life gets very difficult.
So anyway, this island is really running on a system of credit, kept in peoples' heads. All the physical stones add to the system is a way to really rub in the consequences of cheating -- if you gave John the sixth stone on the left for a bushel of potatoes and Jim the same stone for a couple of chickens, next time you need groceries you just might have to actually roll a stone around...
Of course, credit systems can be made much harder to cheat by the proper use of technology. Until recently, the primary technology was writing -- your signature on a check or IOU establishing your agreement to transfer credit, or government printing to give a piece of paper a value backed by the government. The McGuffin would nearly obsolete that system, since by the time matching up serial numbers showed that money or a signed check had been duplicated, it might be impossible to uncover the original cheat. But with databases, the internet, and secure encryption, a lot of sales are already being charged to credit cards with no paper used. Electronic money per se hasn't taken off merely because the need isn't yet pressing enough to force people to abandon a 5,000 year old system while it still works.
I guess you're also against arresting someone who's drinking and driving only because they "might" kill someone.
Pedantically, you can arrest someone who's drinking and driving because they are breaking a law, while (depending on the interpretation of some unnecessarily complicated laws) what bnet is doing may or may not be breaking the law now. You can't arrest them because they might break the law later.
But the interesting question is, why is it right to pass a law against drunk driving because they might kill someone later, and wrong to ban something because it might turn into a copyright violation later?
Answer: IRREMEDIABLE HARM. The copyright holder can wait until there is an actual copyright violation, then go to court, shut them down, and also get monetary damages to replace any alleged lost sales. But if a drunk kills someone, no court can bring them back to life. So given that it is easily shown statistically that drunk drivers are far more likely to kill someone than nearly all sober drivers, it is reasonable to stop them when they start weaving around the road, test them, and arrest them if alcohol or other drugs are the cause, rather than waiting for the crash. There are at least two fine lines here that the legislature should consider, how much hazard is too much, and what kind of tactics are acceptable to catch the drunks.
Note that personally I don't much approve of tactics such as waiting near the bar, pulling everyone over for breathalyzer checks, and prosecuting solely on the basis of the blood alcohol content, rather than looking for evidence of impairment first. I and some of my relatives can get pretty drunk at well under the legal BAC limit. (Inherited metabolic peculiarity. I figured that out in 1976 and haven't drunk since, but if I was an idiot and an asshole, I could drive home drunk every night and never get arrested.) Other people can be functioning pretty well when their BAC is high enough to be illegal in any state. Many of them will have faster reflexes drunk than I am when going home after 14 hours at work -- although if they're driving drunk, they're probably reckless too, and fast reflexes don't make reckless driving safe...
In any sane jurisdiction, using software you have already bought does not require additional permission from the copyright holder.
Commercial software companies contend that, since installing the software typically requires copying it from CD to hard drive, and then running it requires copying it from hard drive to RAM, using software _does_ require additional permission from the copyright holder. In related news, TW-Disney, Inc., announced that, since watching a movie involves making a copy of each frame on the viewer's visual cortex, the entire population of the 1st world is now bound by the EULA contained in a microdot on each CD case, VHS case, movie ticket, or Disney children's book, "By watching this movie or reading this book, you agree never to re-sell this or allow anyone else to view or read it, and you sign all rights to your soul over to TW-Disney, Inc." TW-Disney is filing suit to close all used book stores, libraries, and video rental stores in the world. It refused to say what it plans to do with the souls collected under this EULA, but there is an unconfirmed report that in an upset election, Jehovah, president of Heaven since 4004 BC, has now been replaced by Walt Disney, even though he isn't a resident. Walt Disney is also contesting the recent re-election of Satan as Tyrant of Hell, claiming that demons with pitchforks barred his souls from voting, incinerated ballots in precincts favoring him, and infringed Disney's freedom of speech by holding him head-down in a fiery lake every time he attempted to give his campaign speech. Satan commented, "Hell will be a democracy when you can iceskate on my lava pool."
I agree, in a sane jurisdiction, a sale would be a sale, the copies incidental to normal use of software that was sold shrinkwrapped would be considered implicitly allowed by the sale (that includes hard drive, RAM, and all the backups of the disk image you want to make, as long as you only have one working installation at a time), and the EULA would be ineffective unless agreed to before the sale. So, are there any sane jurisdictions?