Unless you sign a contract at the time of purchase, all those are only effectively warnings and disclaimers.
The "Must not be used to make an explosive device" is probably a reminder that there exists a law that forbids making explosives from fertilizer, or something of that kind.
You can write whatever you want on a label stuck to something you sell, that doesn't make it have legal force however.
In Apple's case, the full version happens to be an expensive dongle called a Macintosh. In what way is Apple doing anything most other companies are not doing?
I'm not arguing about Apple specifically. I'm saying I think that the crux of what Psystar is doing here should be generally legal. This specific discussion is about Apple, but I hold the same opinion regarding any other company that uses the same tactics.
And that "other companies" do it too, doesn't make it any less wrong in my eyes.
Anyway, IMO you're making an argument that makes no sense.
Cheese producer makes cheese. It has quality standards. McDonalds buys this cheese and "modifies" it, creating a Big Mac. This is okay.
McDonalds makes Big Macs. It has quality standards. Company X buys them, and "modifies" them, creating Product. According to you, this is not okay.
I do not see absolutely any difference between both cases. I think that it's that in your mind, a Big Mac is an Official Product (TM), which as some magical "end user product" status and special protections, while the cheese doesn't have it. But things don't work like that in the real world, plenty things are both end products and components, such as video cards and mice for instance.
Also, your argument would means that if I'm at restaurant and offer to pay them $X for somebody to go get a hamburger at the McDonalds around the corner for me, that would somehow be illegal.
Actually, way to misread the quote. Read it again, the burger stand doesn't sell Bigmacs, it sells its own burgers. If it sold bigmacs, it would get sued out of existance, even if it bought all those bigmacs at McDonald's. McDonald's has certain quality standards that are associated with its brand and any unauthorised reseller that isn't subject to the same standards will only tarnish its image.
That's stupid. Acer has quality standards as well, yet I'm perfectly free to buy their laptops and resell them. First sale doctrine. Should work the same for Apple and McDonalds. In fact, I bet the providers McDonalds buys from also have their quality standards. That doesn't stop McDonalds from doing stuff to those products.
I'm pretty sure that buying the laptops and painting them a different color would be fine too.
I didn't say anywhere I'd claim to represent the vendor, obviously the company would advertise itself as a reseller of modified hardware.
As for your customization example, it's the same as your earlier background example. Psystar rewrote parts of the kernel and repackaged the OS X distribution to be distributed. You changing parameters that Apple or Microsoft made modifiable is not creating a derivative work.
I don't see the difference. Everything in a computer is modifyable. Config files are editable, DLL files are replaceable, physical parts can be exchanged with different ones. The vendor doesn't need to bless anything with modifiability, it all is already.
So please go understand the case facts and findings before you post, you're obviously lacking a lot of knowledge about the laws and facts involved.
I'm stating my disagreement with the laws. Law != Good != Moral. When a law is bad it should be thrown out.
I think I remember you from other Psystar threads trolling with the same stuff. Are you being paid ?
First thread on this I post in, don't own Apple hardware or software nor want any, don't own anything from Psystar, nor want it either, or have any other kind of relationship. Don't benefit in any way from Psystar or Apple winning or losing either.
I'm arguing purely out of the principle of what I believe in.
Your background example is laughable. Microsoft authorises such modifications to OEMs. If an OEM were to remove activation from their product though without it being a VLC, you'd see their lawyers all over it and the OEM would get what is coming. Apple does not authorise people to remove their copy protection kext.
I disagree with the entire idea that authorization should be needed for such a thing.
Ok, then, if not being an OEM I sell my laptop with the contents as they are and the CDs of what's installed on it, I'm commiting copyright infringement because I customized things a bit?
And if Psystar had to install every copy from a fresh DVD they bought, they wouldn't be in the business in the first place. The costs associated would be prohibitive.
Why would it? It was 700 computers. Hire somebody out of high school for minimum wage, and get them to walk around a room full of computers, sticking CDs in and clicking at the right times. I'd be surprised if it took more than a week per 700 computers, which would cost less than $1 per box.
And seriously, if Psystar wanted to compete with Apple, why didn't they invest in a a few programmers and wrote their own OS from open source components ?
Because that wasn't the point? The entire reason for the existence of the hackintosh is that the OS is fine, but Apple's hardware selection is limited. People wanted OS X, on hardware they liked better.
The burger stand down the road doesn't compete with McDonald's by selling Big Macs.
Precisely, the burger stand isn't doing any harm to McDonalds because it's still paying for their product at their retail price. So any claim that they hurt McDonalds' business should be held as laughable.
Now whether that makes business sense or not is another matter. An analogy for this case would be a business buying Big Macs, then providing a different kind of service to the clients, like home delivery, adding extra condiments McDonalds doesn't offer, or some such thing. I can't imagine why would there be anything illegal or wrong about that.
Actually, during discovery, Psystar failed to produce any proof that they did purchase the copies of OS X they sold. Not to mention everyone of the about 700 PCs they sold was imaged from an imaging server and thus used a single copy (which was unlawful).
That doesn't change my argument though. I believe that the essence of what they were trying to do should be legal.
Now, the imaging server I think was a screwup, and they should have just paid some minimum age kid to install the CD by hand. Though I think that's a technicality anyway, as I fail to see much difference between paying for 700 CDs and installing from each CD, and paying for 700 CDs, and installing from one.
If they didn't actually pay, their bad.
Finally, they were found guilty of copyright infrigment because they made a derivative work (changed Apple's copy protection kext, "Dont Steal MacOS X") which they put on this imaging server, thus engaging in unlawful distribution of an unauthorised derivative work.
If you think about this too much, pretty much every install of Windows is copyright infringement as well. If the shop say, changes the background, that changes something in the registry. That data was created by a MS employee, and MS probably automatically holds copyright on that. So change a Windows setting, sell to customer, copyright infringement.
So maybe you should get the facts about the case before you judge Psystar as some kind of good guy.
I don't see them as a good guy. I think the DRM is shameful, and their plan was flawed, but I still think that creating a hackintosh and selling it should be legal.
But you never lose the right to say "stuff that" and not buy the product - just because you don't like the deal offered doesn't mean you have the right to ignore the terms!
Deals should be made upfront before money changes hands, with a contract. EULAs shouldn't exist.
And if you do, I want a Ferrari (I just happen to think the price is unreasonable).
When you buy a car, the price is discussed before the sale. Also, it doesn't come with a note in the glovebox saying "And BTW, we forbid you from using third party parts".
Not a huge deal -- the "steady state" will almost certainly be faster than the "ramp-up" period. Worst case, I'm over-optimizing.
No, not necessarily. Running "time cp file.dat copy", with a file.dat of 88MB takes 0.083 seconds on my computer.
Would your conclusion then be that my computer has a disk capable of copying files at 1060MB/s? (It should be even faster when it ramps up!)
That would be complete nonsense of course. What happens is that the entire file goes into the write cache, cp returns almost immediately, and the kernel writes the 88MB over several seconds on the background.
If I copied a DVD image instead, it'd take a much longer time, and the "size/time" would be much closer to reality, because the file wouldn't fit in the cache.
So here you have an example where the steady state is much slower than the rampup, and where measuring too little would lead you to believe there's no performance issue at all, even if the disk is dog slow.
Psystar sold PCs, with some software derived from Open Source
Which is perfectly legal. Even the GPL allows selling the software. Got to release the source of course, but you can sell it.
with Apple's upgrade version of their OS, thumbing their nose at the EULA, and argued because you COULD do it, then it SHOULD be legal. How the heck they ever thought that was going to fly I'll never understand. And no it wasn't a "full version" of the OS - you obtain the right to run Mac OS X when you buy a Mac, and at no other time, so unless there was a Mac in the box too (wiped) I don't see how they ever thought it was going to be "OK".
See, that's a legal trick I have absolutely zero respect for.
Apple was getting paid as their software was getting bought -- they just made sure there was no possible legal way to get the software without getting the hardware as well. I bet if Psystar offered to pay Apple extra for the "full version" they'd refuse to take the money. Then when Psystar used the only thing they had available they sued them. It's a dirty tactic. First they refuse the money, then they sue you for not paying them the money they refused to take.
IMO, EULAs in general, and especially the way Apple used theirs in this case should be illegal and void.
Now, that Psystar hypocritically went and added DRM to their stuff is bad as well, but I still think that the crux of what they were trying to do should be legal.
Hero of Alexandria didn't have trains in mind when he made his Aeolipile. It was used as a fancy way to open temple doors. Only much later people figured out a practical use for it.
Boolean algebra was a very obscure branch nobody cared about until it suddenly became very useful.
Lasers, IIRC didn't have an immediate application when they were invented. They definitely didn't have DVD drives in mind.
It is not true that they are worthless without evidence. They are not only cultural and historical treasures, but may be preserved for a later date when evidence has been found. And even if they are never found to be accurate about history, they can still tell us about a culture and its people.
Oh, I agree that mythology is interesting. But I wouldn't trust it much for geological research. For each story that has some relationship with reality there are hundreds about things like women that can sever their torso and fly around
Another example is the Chinese Shang dynasty, which western scholars simply assumed was mythical, and criticized others as naive for believing that the ancient Chinese would have such accurate records about the past. That is, until archaeologists found ancient turtle bones from the period inscribed with the names of the same kings in the ancient records. There is always such a trend in academia for scholars to toss aside ancient knowledge as pure myth.
Yeah, except that from the TFA:
Despite the link to the dreaming story, weathering and the absence of meteorite fragments suggest that the crater is millions of years old and humans could not possibly have witnessed the event, Hamacher said.
So it's quite possible that something else went boom in the general vicinity, or that the original myth is about some other place with a name that was similar to "Puka", or that over millions lots of stuff has fallen from the sky and if you look hard enough in a wide enough area that hasn't seen a lot of change over time, you're bound to find something.
Such things are worthless if there's no evidence to back them up.
All those myths get warped radically when they're passed from one generation to another. By the time we hear them, there are good chances they indicate nothing of use, even if they refer to a real event.
Take something more recent and well known such as the tale of the Little Red Riding Hood, for instance. The original had the wolf leave the grandma's meat and blood for the girl to eat, then asked her to strip naked and throw the clothing into a fire. It's a story that's familiar to pretty much everybody, yet few people know it wasn't always like the modern version.
Then there's plenty mythology that has absolutely nothing to do with reality.
Mythology is certainly interesting enough to study, but I wouldn't put much weight into it as "transmitted wisdom of the ancient people", since by the time we find about it a lot of that isn't even what the ancient people used to tell each other.
Yeah, any monkey can google, and set up a LDAP server, and put a couple entries on it. But things like that don't exist in a void, they're used by other servers on the network. You need to have an understanding of what is really needed, what is going to use what, what the load will be like, any special requirements and so on.
You'll likely end up with a LDAP server with a "password" password, the wrong schema, on hardware that can't handle the load, or without replication when you really should have it.
Yes, you can google about all that stuff too, but you have to be aware of its existence, what it's used for, figure out which of those things are needed at your company and so on. And figuring all that out properly will take quite a lot of googling, or screwing up a few times. Screwing up the production network is generally seen as a bad thing.
I actually did that when I saw a 3D movie for the first time.
You don't really do that because you think you're going to actually touch it, duh. You do it to see what will happen, as in, will your hand seem like it's going through something that appears to be right in front of you?
It's not stupid people, it's people playing and experimenting with something they've not seen before.
Actually, no. In Excel, formula names are localized, so SUM becomes SUMA in spanish. And it's not automatically converted when you open a foreign document.
Somehow I doubt a minimum wage luggage checker is going to know how to safely swab a grenade, or the permission to do so.
I imagine that the moment they come up with something like that, they call the bomb squad. Considering that these days if they find a laptop suspicious they'll shoot it full of holes, I wouldn't expect them to take the time to figure out if a grenade has the explosive inside or not.
So tell us, what THREATS are there that are comparable to terrorists?
Well, Katrina seems to have caused quite a bit more material damage in New Orleans than what happened on 9/11, and killed quite a few people too.
From a look at the wikipedia page, it seems levee construction was started about 40 years ago, and still not fully done at the time of the disaster, and technical problems were known for at least 20 years or so. So I wouldn't put that much faith into everybody just building a higher wall.
Also, even if the sea rises very slowly, it's not just going to start slowly flooding things, the big problem will be a higher sea level combined with an unusually strong storm.
Yes, it does have a tremendous number of player accounts register, but how many are active?
Well, Eve Online just broke the news that they reached a new record with 45000 online users at once.
Right now, SL is at 60000, during the low times (night in the US) it's about 30K, and I've seen it reach 70K. But somehow nobody is saying Eve is dying, heh.
Er, it's not dead by any means yet. In fact load seems to be climbing still, just slower than it used to.
And you can still be a bipedal cat, have sex with anything, or go to a club with strippers. There a few more rules in place than there were some years ago, but none of what you mentioned except gambling went anywhere.
Now the thing about playing the slots is unfortunate US stupidity, but that's not SL's fault.
Can you provide a link? There are a lot of those very large windmills here, but at any one time it looks like about half of them are standing still (damaged? maintenance?) I can't seem to find any unbiased figures. Google seems to favor sites by either Al Gore fans or GW-hoax believers.
In other words, you're not interested in the actual numbers, but in a site that gives the numbers you want to see.
I'm not that sure there's much of a "we" in this matter, as we don't really need to agree about anything, including what each of us considers to be insulting:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you sign a contract at the time of purchase, all those are only effectively warnings and disclaimers.
The "Must not be used to make an explosive device" is probably a reminder that there exists a law that forbids making explosives from fertilizer, or something of that kind.
You can write whatever you want on a label stuck to something you sell, that doesn't make it have legal force however.
Okay, then if I buy a laptop, perform some large modifications like for instance removing IE, and sell it on ebay, that would be illegal?
If it isn't illegal and I start a company that does that, does it become illegal then?
If there's any illegality involved, then I think there shouldn't be any.
I'm not arguing about Apple specifically. I'm saying I think that the crux of what Psystar is doing here should be generally legal. This specific discussion is about Apple, but I hold the same opinion regarding any other company that uses the same tactics.
And that "other companies" do it too, doesn't make it any less wrong in my eyes.
Ah, oops. Guess I forgot.
Anyway, IMO you're making an argument that makes no sense.
Cheese producer makes cheese. It has quality standards. McDonalds buys this cheese and "modifies" it, creating a Big Mac. This is okay.
McDonalds makes Big Macs. It has quality standards. Company X buys them, and "modifies" them, creating Product. According to you, this is not okay.
I do not see absolutely any difference between both cases. I think that it's that in your mind, a Big Mac is an Official Product (TM), which as some magical "end user product" status and special protections, while the cheese doesn't have it. But things don't work like that in the real world, plenty things are both end products and components, such as video cards and mice for instance.
Also, your argument would means that if I'm at restaurant and offer to pay them $X for somebody to go get a hamburger at the McDonalds around the corner for me, that would somehow be illegal.
That's stupid. Acer has quality standards as well, yet I'm perfectly free to buy their laptops and resell them. First sale doctrine. Should work the same for Apple and McDonalds. In fact, I bet the providers McDonalds buys from also have their quality standards. That doesn't stop McDonalds from doing stuff to those products.
I'm pretty sure that buying the laptops and painting them a different color would be fine too.
I didn't say anywhere I'd claim to represent the vendor, obviously the company would advertise itself as a reseller of modified hardware.
I don't see the difference. Everything in a computer is modifyable. Config files are editable, DLL files are replaceable, physical parts can be exchanged with different ones. The vendor doesn't need to bless anything with modifiability, it all is already.
I'm stating my disagreement with the laws. Law != Good != Moral. When a law is bad it should be thrown out.
First thread on this I post in, don't own Apple hardware or software nor want any, don't own anything from Psystar, nor want it either, or have any other kind of relationship. Don't benefit in any way from Psystar or Apple winning or losing either.
I'm arguing purely out of the principle of what I believe in.
I disagree with the entire idea that authorization should be needed for such a thing.
Ok, then, if not being an OEM I sell my laptop with the contents as they are and the CDs of what's installed on it, I'm commiting copyright infringement because I customized things a bit?
Why would it? It was 700 computers. Hire somebody out of high school for minimum wage, and get them to walk around a room full of computers, sticking CDs in and clicking at the right times. I'd be surprised if it took more than a week per 700 computers, which would cost less than $1 per box.
Because that wasn't the point? The entire reason for the existence of the hackintosh is that the OS is fine, but Apple's hardware selection is limited. People wanted OS X, on hardware they liked better.
Precisely, the burger stand isn't doing any harm to McDonalds because it's still paying for their product at their retail price. So any claim that they hurt McDonalds' business should be held as laughable.
Now whether that makes business sense or not is another matter. An analogy for this case would be a business buying Big Macs, then providing a different kind of service to the clients, like home delivery, adding extra condiments McDonalds doesn't offer, or some such thing. I can't imagine why would there be anything illegal or wrong about that.
That doesn't change my argument though. I believe that the essence of what they were trying to do should be legal.
Now, the imaging server I think was a screwup, and they should have just paid some minimum age kid to install the CD by hand. Though I think that's a technicality anyway, as I fail to see much difference between paying for 700 CDs and installing from each CD, and paying for 700 CDs, and installing from one.
If they didn't actually pay, their bad.
If you think about this too much, pretty much every install of Windows is copyright infringement as well. If the shop say, changes the background, that changes something in the registry. That data was created by a MS employee, and MS probably automatically holds copyright on that. So change a Windows setting, sell to customer, copyright infringement.
I don't see them as a good guy. I think the DRM is shameful, and their plan was flawed, but I still think that creating a hackintosh and selling it should be legal.
Deals should be made upfront before money changes hands, with a contract. EULAs shouldn't exist.
When you buy a car, the price is discussed before the sale. Also, it doesn't come with a note in the glovebox saying "And BTW, we forbid you from using third party parts".
No, not necessarily. Running "time cp file.dat copy", with a file.dat of 88MB takes 0.083 seconds on my computer.
Would your conclusion then be that my computer has a disk capable of copying files at 1060MB/s? (It should be even faster when it ramps up!)
That would be complete nonsense of course. What happens is that the entire file goes into the write cache, cp returns almost immediately, and the kernel writes the 88MB over several seconds on the background.
If I copied a DVD image instead, it'd take a much longer time, and the "size/time" would be much closer to reality, because the file wouldn't fit in the cache.
So here you have an example where the steady state is much slower than the rampup, and where measuring too little would lead you to believe there's no performance issue at all, even if the disk is dog slow.
Which is perfectly legal. Even the GPL allows selling the software. Got to release the source of course, but you can sell it.
See, that's a legal trick I have absolutely zero respect for.
Apple was getting paid as their software was getting bought -- they just made sure there was no possible legal way to get the software without getting the hardware as well. I bet if Psystar offered to pay Apple extra for the "full version" they'd refuse to take the money. Then when Psystar used the only thing they had available they sued them. It's a dirty tactic. First they refuse the money, then they sue you for not paying them the money they refused to take.
IMO, EULAs in general, and especially the way Apple used theirs in this case should be illegal and void.
Now, that Psystar hypocritically went and added DRM to their stuff is bad as well, but I still think that the crux of what they were trying to do should be legal.
How would they know?
Hero of Alexandria didn't have trains in mind when he made his Aeolipile. It was used as a fancy way to open temple doors. Only much later people figured out a practical use for it.
Boolean algebra was a very obscure branch nobody cared about until it suddenly became very useful.
Lasers, IIRC didn't have an immediate application when they were invented. They definitely didn't have DVD drives in mind.
Oh, I agree that mythology is interesting. But I wouldn't trust it much for geological research. For each story that has some relationship with reality there are hundreds about things like women that can sever their torso and fly around
Yeah, except that from the TFA:
So it's quite possible that something else went boom in the general vicinity, or that the original myth is about some other place with a name that was similar to "Puka", or that over millions lots of stuff has fallen from the sky and if you look hard enough in a wide enough area that hasn't seen a lot of change over time, you're bound to find something.
Such things are worthless if there's no evidence to back them up.
All those myths get warped radically when they're passed from one generation to another. By the time we hear them, there are good chances they indicate nothing of use, even if they refer to a real event.
Take something more recent and well known such as the tale of the Little Red Riding Hood, for instance. The original had the wolf leave the grandma's meat and blood for the girl to eat, then asked her to strip naked and throw the clothing into a fire. It's a story that's familiar to pretty much everybody, yet few people know it wasn't always like the modern version.
Then there's plenty mythology that has absolutely nothing to do with reality.
Mythology is certainly interesting enough to study, but I wouldn't put much weight into it as "transmitted wisdom of the ancient people", since by the time we find about it a lot of that isn't even what the ancient people used to tell each other.
Excellent way of ending up with a complete mess.
Yeah, any monkey can google, and set up a LDAP server, and put a couple entries on it. But things like that don't exist in a void, they're used by other servers on the network. You need to have an understanding of what is really needed, what is going to use what, what the load will be like, any special requirements and so on.
You'll likely end up with a LDAP server with a "password" password, the wrong schema, on hardware that can't handle the load, or without replication when you really should have it.
Yes, you can google about all that stuff too, but you have to be aware of its existence, what it's used for, figure out which of those things are needed at your company and so on. And figuring all that out properly will take quite a lot of googling, or screwing up a few times. Screwing up the production network is generally seen as a bad thing.
I actually did that when I saw a 3D movie for the first time.
You don't really do that because you think you're going to actually touch it, duh. You do it to see what will happen, as in, will your hand seem like it's going through something that appears to be right in front of you?
It's not stupid people, it's people playing and experimenting with something they've not seen before.
Actually, no. In Excel, formula names are localized, so SUM becomes SUMA in spanish. And it's not automatically converted when you open a foreign document.
Somehow I doubt a minimum wage luggage checker is going to know how to safely swab a grenade, or the permission to do so.
I imagine that the moment they come up with something like that, they call the bomb squad. Considering that these days if they find a laptop suspicious they'll shoot it full of holes, I wouldn't expect them to take the time to figure out if a grenade has the explosive inside or not.
Well, Katrina seems to have caused quite a bit more material damage in New Orleans than what happened on 9/11, and killed quite a few people too.
From a look at the wikipedia page, it seems levee construction was started about 40 years ago, and still not fully done at the time of the disaster, and technical problems were known for at least 20 years or so. So I wouldn't put that much faith into everybody just building a higher wall.
Also, even if the sea rises very slowly, it's not just going to start slowly flooding things, the big problem will be a higher sea level combined with an unusually strong storm.
Well, Eve Online just broke the news that they reached a new record with 45000 online users at once.
Right now, SL is at 60000, during the low times (night in the US) it's about 30K, and I've seen it reach 70K. But somehow nobody is saying Eve is dying, heh.
Er, it's not dead by any means yet. In fact load seems to be climbing still, just slower than it used to.
And you can still be a bipedal cat, have sex with anything, or go to a club with strippers. There a few more rules in place than there were some years ago, but none of what you mentioned except gambling went anywhere.
Now the thing about playing the slots is unfortunate US stupidity, but that's not SL's fault.
What do you mean "was"?
It's still doing pretty nicely. Not growing so much anymore, but doesn't seem to be shrinking. I don't see any decrease in the areas I hang out at.
Warcraft isn't a SL replacement. I know that quite a few people have WoW accounts, but they still keep logging into SL.
In other words, you're not interested in the actual numbers, but in a site that gives the numbers you want to see.
In case you haven't noticed, The Onion only publishes fictional news as a form of satire. Nothing in it should be taken seriously.
I'm not that sure there's much of a "we" in this matter, as we don't really need to agree about anything, including what each of us considers to be insulting :-)