As someone about to head off on a 6 month trip around asia, I would love to have a functioning e-book to take along. Currently I have a pile of travel books at home a bit over a foot high (borrowed from friends) - I would love to take them with me, but just dont have the space in my luggage. I would also happily read some 15 novels or so during my trip - again, no space. So I am kind of stuck with a single travel book which covers all of asia without any detail, and a hope that I will be able to find a good english novel somewhere in a village in northern Burma.
An ebook would be great - as many books as I want to take in a package smaller than my current novel; easy searching in the travel book, preferrably with hyperlinks.
Whats stopping me - battery power, and a lack of titles to choose from. Once ebooks supported a huge range of titles, each at a reasonable price (ie much cheaper than the dead tree variety, because I assume I wont be able to ever transfer it to another reader) and once the battery life issue is solved (ie no backlight!) then I would jump in.
The main reason for region codes is to increase profits by ripping us off. They prevent people importing DVDs (legally!) from other countries where they are cheaper, and re-selling them in other countries where they are more expensive.
If it was really just for the staggered movie releases then why is it that DVD releases of old movies are always region coded? Why is Matrix region coded - they had a simultaneous worldwide release!
It is also cr&* that the region codes are for copy protection - you dont need to decrypt the disk to copy it.
Conclusion - region codes are there so that studios can have different prices in different countries. Pure profit, with the customers losing out.
Nielsen Soundscan already tracks paid downloads. It wouldn't be hard for them to track popularity of P2P downloads too.
However what happens to the tracking if the artists themselves decide to boost their income by having bots download their songs as often as possible?
Tracking P2P downloads is probably simple and accurate as long as noone is profiting directly from the results. As soon as an individuals salary is completely dependant on these figures then I think it will get much more difficult to ensure the correctness of the results - it is too easy for people to influence.
No, a decade or two ago people like me were saying that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and guess what - it is still true. This is not a question of whether they can improve the technology, it is limited by the laws of physics.
If the idea has no practical application, why are you complaining about a specific implementation of it?
umm, I guess it was to point out that a $10000, 4lb/3kg, 0.08 megapixel camera is not very practical. You planning on buying one?
Another ten years of improvement and suddenly we have 16 megapixel images using this technology
NO, we are not going to have 16 megapixel versions of this. The laws of physics dont change very quickly, the wavelength of visible light is pretty stable and as a result, the minimum size of pixels are not going to get much smaller than they already are in mobile phones! This technology cant go beyond 1 megapixel, not because we dont have the technology yet but because the laws of physics will limit this.
Now, what exactly were your qualifications? They certainly dont include anything about physics, electronics or image sensor design! So shut up and let people who actually know about this technology write something relevant about it.
Sure its fair to say you lose resolution - the output image of your 16MP camera is 0.08MP. How do you want to pass this off as "no loss of resolution???"
Maybe you can reduce the size of the pixels without increasing the noise in the final image, but be warned - as these pixels get noisy, the quality of your refocusing will drop. There is always a cost of reducing pixel size.
It also doesnt work to make really tiny pixels, you basically cant go below 2umx2um for a pixel, otherwise the pixel size is too close to the wavelength of light (0.7um) and then they stop working. A 12x12 array of 2umx2um pixels - thats BIG and physics will stop you getting them any smaller... inside a mobile phone you wont get more than 0.025 megapixels!! - useless! In a big expensive 35mm camera, you wont even get 2MP - who is going to pay $5000 for a 1.5MP camera?
I saw this article about a week back. I am quite sure that this will never see a practical application... They take a 16MP input image to produce a 0.08MP output image!!! They are using a $15000 camera system to produce images one quarter the size of VGA!!! Say what you want, but there are better ways to improve DOF.
They reduce resolution by a factor of 180, but only improve depth-of-field by a factor 7. This is particularly silly because the only reason they have a bad depth-of-field is because they are using a huge expensive sensor. If they would switch to a small cheap sensor like you find in any cheap digicam (1/1.8"), they would get the same improvement, and save $14800.
The light-performace of this small sensor would be just as good as their large one - if you use the same huge pixels that they do (to produce a 0.08MP image), you will get the same low light performance.
Hiding encrypted data on a computer is actually very difficult - Encrypted data looks like random bytes. To find it, just search for files (or disk sectors) that are uncompressible... If its not a.zip,.rar or.bz2 then most likely, its been encrypted.
Its pretty safe to assume that the police already have programs to do these searches for them very quickly.
Dont avoid large posters - they look GREAT! I have a 1.5m (5ft) long panorama on my wall at home which is amazing.
Where to get these at a reasonable price - Look for an online poster-print site. I use this one in germany: http://digiposter.de/main/preise_poster.php A3 - 4.00 Euro A2 - 7.50 Euro I would say... dont avoid large prints - 7.50 is not rediculously priced!
To show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way.
To stress C compilers with unusual code.
To illustrate some of the subtleties of the C language.
To provide a safe forum for poor C code.:-)
They certainly achieve their goal of showing how bad caode can be and also of providing a safe forum for amazing C code. I have also learnt much better how to program in C, even for unobfuscated code. There is nothing like going through some of these entries to understand much better how the preprocessor works, and how compilers react to differrent constructs. So, the only goal left is that of stressing the C compilers... does anyone have some good examples of bugs found *and later fixed* in c compilers due to this competition? There are certainly enough evidence of the compilers being crashed, but I wonder if anything positive has come out of it.
Well, there is kind of a similar competition for perl... perl golf... where the aim is to write the smallest possible perl program to fulfill a particular task. The winners of these competitions are invariably amazingly obfuscated, and unbelievably small! One example - one competition involved calculating and printing out the huffman codes for a given input - the winner achieved this with a 76 character perl program!
This I also love - the first ever entry was a hello world program!
That entry was the longest one ever made into a tattoo, however there are hundreds of people around the world who have unknowingly had this entry tattoed on their forearm: http://www.de.ioccc.org/years.html#1994_smr
This is really a great competition - lots of fun, lots to learn. Try understanding how some of the entries work, its really a challenge sometimes, and you can learn plenty about C and the preprocessor.
The URL itself is NOT trademark infringement. To be trademark infringement, you need to be somehow involved in the same or similar market. Free-speech is also protected.
That is why www.walmart-blows.com is also not trademark infringement.
So... If the owner were to take down all gaming possibilities from his site, and replace it with a long essay slamming hasbro for being corporate bullies, then he would no longer have a trademark or copyright problem. Patents are for sure not an issue either - the game is way too old for that.
This is not true. As covered above, if you implement your own idea and it happens to be an idea that was earlier, independantly patented then you are infringing it. Separate development offers you no protection.
The reason why you should never look through patent databases is that if you know that a patent exists and then go ahead and infringe it then you are liable for much higher damages than if you did it without knowing about the patent at all.
Firstly, lets make one thing clear - Warchalking itself is not theft!! Making unauthorised use of a wireless network could possibly be deemed as theft, but I would disagree.
Consider as a comparison a company which has a drinking fountain in their entrance hall. Is it theft for me to drink from this fountain? The company could probably claim that I was not authorised to consume their water and that this was clearly a case of theft! They would probably be right.
Dont forget that a lot of places that have open wireless networks have specifically left them open to everyone as a public service, eg cafe's, private people etc. There is no way for the person to know what the intention is of the person providing this service.
Therefore, i would say that using a companies network should be prosecuted as theft if it was VERY clearly announced that use of this network was not allowed. If this is not made clear then it is unreasonable to expect the user to know the expectations of the owner of the network.
Although it is true that someone who steals software owes the company money, this has very little to do with the question of how much money the company loses due to piracy!!!!
Why? If a company claims that it has lost $1,000,000 due to piracy then they are claiming that this year they had sales of $10,000,000 BUT if there had been NO PIRACY at all then they would have had sales of $11,000,000. See the difference?
How bout this for a marketing ploy - sell the nomad with a 20MB HDD installed (costing a whole $0.42 in tax) and then offer a "Buy 1 nomad, get 1 40GB HDD for free!!" deal.
I cant believe that they will tax every hard drive which is sold...
On another note - anyone know if there is a "copyright tax" on Minidiscs?
I remember at least a year ago I was looking through my collection of CD's and came across my old Civ2 CD (checking copyright on CD... from 1996). So I thought - great, I would love to play this again. The install went fine, and I was up and playing quite quickly (enjoying the questions about whether I want to enable the tiny tiny videos/heralds as they need 16MB of memory !!?!?!)
Then I fairly quickly realised that the first releases of Civ2 were quite buggy / unfriendly, but that these had been fixed in a series of patches (I think 14 of them in the end). When I first bought the game it was no problem to download the patches from the microprose site, but there was no chance of downloading it from infogrames (or whoever happened to own it then). So I searched around and found the patch on some download site.
Now, The patch is also protected by copyright, just as much as any abandonware game is protected. So, do those companies who oppose abandonware so vigorously also oppose this distribution of this patch? I think that to claim that distribution of a patch for an old game is just as bad as distributing the latest release on some warez site is just stupid. Hopefully these companies would say the same thing, but im not so sure...
(Having just checked the infogrames site, I can see that they now have the patch available for download! Full marks to infogrames for still supporting the game!)
I think the question should not be whether people would be willing to pay for the software if it was still available for sale (probably not, but depends on the price - at $2 there is a good chance, at $39.95 - not likely).
What we need to ask is whether Abandonware supporters would happily remove titles from their sites if a company started selling the game again. Here I think the sites would happily remove them - The titles are available, no need for the abandonware site to distribute it.
As long as this is true, then I think that abandonware sites are morally correct, although they are almost certainly breaking the letter of the law.
There I was, having a problem with ssh that I just couldnt fix, so I thought I would upgrade to woody. The ssh version went from 1.2.x to 2.9.x (or something like that) and the problem disappeared! I mean 1.2 to 2.9 is a big jump - I am not surprised that it made a difference.
Are there any other linux distros which still have the 2.2 kernel as their current release version? Personally I would prefer to see woody released earlier instead of doing small patches to an out-of-date distro. I mean dont get me wrong, debian is great, I love it as a distro, its just that right now it seems a bit behind the times.
No, The point is that Nimda had already hit 90-something% of the computers that it was going to hit within the first day or so.
If after the first day the nimda virus wiped the hard disk drive then I think the world would have been a whole lot more pissed off - wipeing 90 million harddisks is worse than infecting 100 million computers. And just because the virus wipes the hard-disk doesnt mean it cant leave itself in memory to keep on infecting till someone comes by. Also the virus continues to live on in the computers that were infected during the 24hours before the disk was wiped (and so on...)
As it was when nimda arrived just after the WTC disaster I was wondering if this was going to be a second part of the terrorist attack... it turned out not to be the case, but if it had been, If the virus was designed to do as much damage as possible... then the world would have been left reeling...
Which tempts another question - is there anything worse a virus can do than wipe a hard-disk? Are there ways that software can directly damage hardware / change bios settings......
That it is only possible to damage audio equipment with the (non-functional) COPIES!
At least the original product will not damage your system, so maybe the manufacturor will claim that they didnt sell a defective product!
As long as the original still sounds perfect and cant damage your audio equipment then is there really any chance of us being able to lodge a reasonable complaint.
What really worries me about these copy protection systems is the effect it will have on the durability of the disks. If they have already killed the error correction in some parts of the CD so badly that the played has to interpolate then you had better hope you dont get any dust/scratches near-by!
As click thru agreements are so long, what happens if you dont read it all, and in section 59.k it says something that you never dreamed would be in the licence. I am not the only person who doesn't read the whole licence every time I install software. The people distributing the software know that the majority of people havent read the licence that they agree to. Does this have any effect on the validity of the details of the licence?
I recognize that the user cant claim "I didnt read the licence, I didnt realise I wasnt allowed to sell copies of Excel to people", but in some of the click-thru licences, there are really restrictive terms that I am sure most users dont realise are there/regularly disobey. Are these terms still 100% enforceable?
Some examples:
(From the hotmail terms of service, already discussed here at slashdot)
However, by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting your Submission you are granting Microsoft, its affiliated companies and
necessary sublicensees permission to use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses including, without limitation, the rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly
perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Submission; and to publish your name in connection with your Submission.
From the start of your paper:
LICENSE: By operating or retaining a copy of this program, the user hereinafter agrees to abide by all the terms and conditions of the following agreement (that everybody is expected to read but nobody ever does), as well as Robert's Rules of Order and such other terms and conditions, real, imaginary, subjective, objective or offensive, as the Software Distributor shall deem appropriate or desirable, including the right to perform unreasonable search and seizures of the user's computer, home, person and pets, whether there is sunshine when she's gone or if New York is indeed the city that never sleeps, for better or for worse, to death do us part, would you like fries with that, don't put the cart before the horse even if you do lead it to water and try to force it to drink, in God we trust, unless of course, you are atheist or agnostic, thank you very much and don't forget to put all of your savings into our inflated stock.
I think you mean "Open Source really isn't a good thing in general IF YOU WANT TO MAKE PROFIT." Sure, thats clear. However, Microsoft is claiming that Open Source is somehow bad for society!! Or its just inherently evil.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone about to head off on a 6 month trip around asia, I would love to have a functioning e-book to take along. Currently I have a pile of travel books at home a bit over a foot high (borrowed from friends) - I would love to take them with me, but just dont have the space in my luggage. I would also happily read some 15 novels or so during my trip - again, no space. So I am kind of stuck with a single travel book which covers all of asia without any detail, and a hope that I will be able to find a good english novel somewhere in a village in northern Burma.
An ebook would be great - as many books as I want to take in a package smaller than my current novel; easy searching in the travel book, preferrably with hyperlinks.
Whats stopping me - battery power, and a lack of titles to choose from. Once ebooks supported a huge range of titles, each at a reasonable price (ie much cheaper than the dead tree variety, because I assume I wont be able to ever transfer it to another reader) and once the battery life issue is solved (ie no backlight!) then I would jump in.
The main reason for region codes is to increase profits by ripping us off. They prevent people importing DVDs (legally!) from other countries where they are cheaper, and re-selling them in other countries where they are more expensive.
If it was really just for the staggered movie releases then why is it that DVD releases of old movies are always region coded? Why is Matrix region coded - they had a simultaneous worldwide release!
It is also cr&* that the region codes are for copy protection - you dont need to decrypt the disk to copy it.
Conclusion - region codes are there so that studios can have different prices in different countries. Pure profit, with the customers losing out.
Nielsen Soundscan already tracks paid downloads. It wouldn't be hard for them to track popularity of P2P downloads too.
However what happens to the tracking if the artists themselves decide to boost their income by having bots download their songs as often as possible?
Tracking P2P downloads is probably simple and accurate as long as noone is profiting directly from the results. As soon as an individuals salary is completely dependant on these figures then I think it will get much more difficult to ensure the correctness of the results - it is too easy for people to influence.
No, a decade or two ago people like me were saying that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and guess what - it is still true. This is not a question of whether they can improve the technology, it is limited by the laws of physics.
If the idea has no practical application, why are you complaining about a specific implementation of it?
umm, I guess it was to point out that a $10000, 4lb/3kg, 0.08 megapixel camera is not very practical. You planning on buying one?
Another ten years of improvement and suddenly we have 16 megapixel images using this technology
NO, we are not going to have 16 megapixel versions of this. The laws of physics dont change very quickly, the wavelength of visible light is pretty stable and as a result, the minimum size of pixels are not going to get much smaller than they already are in mobile phones! This technology cant go beyond 1 megapixel, not because we dont have the technology yet but because the laws of physics will limit this.
Now, what exactly were your qualifications? They certainly dont include anything about physics, electronics or image sensor design! So shut up and let people who actually know about this technology write something relevant about it.
Sure its fair to say you lose resolution - the output image of your 16MP camera is 0.08MP. How do you want to pass this off as "no loss of resolution???"
... inside a mobile phone you wont get more than 0.025 megapixels!! - useless! In a big expensive 35mm camera, you wont even get 2MP - who is going to pay $5000 for a 1.5MP camera?
Maybe you can reduce the size of the pixels without increasing the noise in the final image, but be warned - as these pixels get noisy, the quality of your refocusing will drop. There is always a cost of reducing pixel size.
It also doesnt work to make really tiny pixels, you basically cant go below 2umx2um for a pixel, otherwise the pixel size is too close to the wavelength of light (0.7um) and then they stop working.
A 12x12 array of 2umx2um pixels - thats BIG and physics will stop you getting them any smaller
I saw this article about a week back. I am quite sure that this will never see a practical application ... They take a 16MP input image to produce a 0.08MP output image!!! They are using a $15000 camera system to produce images one quarter the size of VGA!!! Say what you want, but there are better ways to improve DOF.
w topic=9354
They reduce resolution by a factor of 180, but only improve depth-of-field by a factor 7. This is particularly silly because the only reason they have a bad depth-of-field is because they are using a huge expensive sensor. If they would switch to a small cheap sensor like you find in any cheap digicam (1/1.8"), they would get the same improvement, and save $14800.
The light-performace of this small sensor would be just as good as their large one - if you use the same huge pixels that they do (to produce a 0.08MP image), you will get the same low light performance.
If you want more details on why this idea has no use, check out this thread:
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?sho
Interesting article, no practical application.
Hiding encrypted data on a computer is actually very difficult - Encrypted data looks like random bytes. To find it, just search for files (or disk sectors) that are uncompressible ... If its not a .zip, .rar or .bz2 then most likely, its been encrypted.
Its pretty safe to assume that the police already have programs to do these searches for them very quickly.
Dont avoid large posters - they look GREAT!
... dont avoid large prints - 7.50 is not rediculously priced!
I have a 1.5m (5ft) long panorama on my wall at home which is amazing.
Where to get these at a reasonable price - Look for an online poster-print site. I use this one in germany:
http://digiposter.de/main/preise_poster.php
A3 - 4.00 Euro
A2 - 7.50 Euro
I would say
You can get posters up to 1m x 3m!
They certainly achieve their goal of showing how bad caode can be and also of providing a safe forum for amazing C code.
I have also learnt much better how to program in C, even for unobfuscated code. There is nothing like going through some of these entries to understand much better how the preprocessor works, and how compilers react to differrent constructs.
So, the only goal left is that of stressing the C compilers
Well, there is kind of a similar competition for perl ... perl golf ... where the aim is to write the smallest possible perl program to fulfill a particular task. The winners of these competitions are invariably amazingly obfuscated, and unbelievably small!
One example - one competition involved calculating and printing out the huffman codes for a given input - the winner achieved this with a 76 character perl program!
find more here:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=perl+golf
or here http://terje.perlgolf.org/
This I love - One guy went and had the first ever entry in the ioccc (from 1984) tattooed on his forearm ...
http://tattoo.thomasscovell.com/index.html
This I also love - the first ever entry was a hello world program!
That entry was the longest one ever made into a tattoo, however there are hundreds of people around the world who have unknowingly had this entry tattoed on their forearm:
http://www.de.ioccc.org/years.html#1994_smr
This is really a great competition - lots of fun, lots to learn. Try understanding how some of the entries work, its really a challenge sometimes, and you can learn plenty about C and the preprocessor.
The URL itself is NOT trademark infringement. To be trademark infringement, you need to be somehow involved in the same or similar market. Free-speech is also protected.
... If the owner were to take down all gaming possibilities from his site, and replace it with a long essay slamming hasbro for being corporate bullies, then he would no longer have a trademark or copyright problem. Patents are for sure not an issue either - the game is way too old for that.
That is why www.walmart-blows.com is also not trademark infringement.
So
This is not true. As covered above, if you implement your own idea and it happens to be an idea that was earlier, independantly patented then you are infringing it. Separate development offers you no protection.
The reason why you should never look through patent databases is that if you know that a patent exists and then go ahead and infringe it then you are liable for much higher damages than if you did it without knowing about the patent at all.
Firstly, lets make one thing clear - Warchalking itself is not theft!! Making unauthorised use of a
wireless network could possibly be deemed as theft, but I would disagree.
Consider as a comparison a company which has a drinking fountain in their entrance hall. Is it theft for me to drink from this fountain? The company could probably claim that I was not authorised to consume their water and that this
was clearly a case of theft! They would probably be right.
Dont forget that a lot of places that have open wireless networks have specifically left them open to everyone as a public service, eg cafe's, private people etc. There is no way for the person to know what the intention is of the person providing this service.
Therefore, i would say that using a companies network should be prosecuted as theft if it was VERY clearly announced that use of this network was not allowed. If this is not made clear then it is unreasonable to expect the user to know the expectations of the owner of the network.
Although it is true that someone who steals software owes the company money, this has very little to do with the question of how much money the company loses due to piracy!!!!
Why? If a company claims that it has lost $1,000,000 due to piracy then they are claiming that this year they had sales of $10,000,000 BUT if there had been NO PIRACY at all then they would have had sales of $11,000,000. See the difference?
How bout this for a marketing ploy - sell the nomad with a 20MB HDD installed (costing a whole $0.42 in tax) and then offer a "Buy 1 nomad, get 1 40GB HDD for free!!" deal.
I cant believe that they will tax every hard drive which is sold...
On another note - anyone know if there is a "copyright tax" on Minidiscs?
I remember at least a year ago I was looking through my collection of CD's and came across my old Civ2 CD (checking copyright on CD ... from 1996). So I thought - great, I would love to play this again. The install went fine, and I was up and playing quite quickly (enjoying the questions about whether I want to enable the tiny tiny videos/heralds as they need 16MB of memory !!?!?!)
Then I fairly quickly realised that the first releases of Civ2 were quite buggy / unfriendly, but that these had been fixed in a series of patches (I think 14 of them in the end). When I first bought the game it was no problem to download the patches from the microprose site, but there was no chance of downloading it from infogrames (or whoever happened to own it then). So I searched around and found the patch on some download site.
Now, The patch is also protected by copyright, just as much as any abandonware game is protected. So, do those companies who oppose abandonware so vigorously also oppose this distribution of this patch? I think that to claim that distribution of a patch for an old game is just as bad as distributing the latest release on some warez site is just stupid. Hopefully these companies would say the same thing, but im not so sure...
(Having just checked the infogrames site, I can see that they now have the patch available for download! Full marks to infogrames for still supporting the game!)
Be careful about the question that you ask ...
I think the question should not be whether people would be willing to pay for the software if it was still available for sale (probably not, but depends on the price - at $2 there is a good chance, at $39.95 - not likely).
What we need to ask is whether Abandonware supporters would happily remove titles from their sites if a company started selling the game again. Here I think the sites would happily remove them - The titles are available, no need for the abandonware site to distribute it.
As long as this is true, then I think that abandonware sites are morally correct, although they are almost certainly breaking the letter of the law.
There I was, having a problem with ssh that I just couldnt fix, so I thought I would upgrade to woody. The ssh version went from 1.2.x to 2.9.x (or something like that) and the problem disappeared! I mean 1.2 to 2.9 is a big jump - I am not surprised that it made a difference.
Are there any other linux distros which still have the 2.2 kernel as their current release version? Personally I would prefer to see woody released earlier instead of doing small patches to an out-of-date distro. I mean dont get me wrong, debian is great, I love it as a distro, its just that right now it seems a bit behind the times.
No, The point is that Nimda had already hit 90-something% of the computers that it was going to hit within the first day or so.
...)
... it turned out not to be the case, but if it had been, If the virus was designed to do as much damage as possible ... then the world would have been left reeling...
... ...
If after the first day the nimda virus wiped the hard disk drive then I think the world would have been a whole lot more pissed off - wipeing 90 million harddisks is worse than infecting 100 million computers. And just because the virus wipes the hard-disk doesnt mean it cant leave itself in memory to keep on infecting till someone comes by. Also the virus continues to live on in the computers that were infected during the 24hours before the disk was wiped (and so on
As it was when nimda arrived just after the WTC disaster I was wondering if this was going to be a second part of the terrorist attack
Which tempts another question - is there anything worse a virus can do than wipe a hard-disk? Are there ways that software can directly damage hardware / change bios settings
Tell your coworker that it installs just fine without root - just install in his home directory...
You can go on enjoying the features of vi/ex/ed/cat whatever you wat and he can enjoy vim!
That it is only possible to damage audio equipment with the (non-functional) COPIES!
At least the original product will not damage your system, so maybe the manufacturor will claim that they didnt sell a defective product!
As long as the original still sounds perfect and cant damage your audio equipment then is there really any chance of us being able to lodge a reasonable complaint.
What really worries me about these copy protection systems is the effect it will have on the durability of the disks. If they have already killed the error correction in some parts of the CD so badly that the played has to interpolate then you had better hope you dont get any dust/scratches near-by!
I recognize that the user cant claim "I didnt read the licence, I didnt realise I wasnt allowed to sell copies of Excel to people", but in some of the click-thru licences, there are really restrictive terms that I am sure most users dont realise are there/regularly disobey. Are these terms still 100% enforceable?
Some examples:
(From the hotmail terms of service, already discussed here at slashdot)
From the start of your paper:
I think that claim is pretty difficult to defend.