The Supreme Court has strongly disagreed. Take McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n, 514 U.S. 334 (1995). In the majority opinion, Stevens noted that any attempt to force people to include their identity in their speech was an attempt to regulate the content of the speech.
He stated: "Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.... It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation--and their ideas from suppression--at the hand of an intolerant society. The right to remain anonymous may be abused when it shields fraudulent conduct. But political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, and, in general, our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse.
Thomas concurred in the judgment, but he based his reasoning off of a rather fascinating historical analysis (worth a read). Scalia (with Rehnquist on board) was the only dissenter, finding that he could "imagine no reason why an anonymous leaflet is any more honorable, as a general matter, than an anonymous phone call or an anonymous letter. It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of the anonymity." He said that there should be exceptions to protect against a fear of threats or reprisals, but no general rule protecting anonymity.
You should be accountable to your fellow man for what you say. Words are actionable things.
Why? Why should you be "accountable" for your beliefs, and what form of "accounting" do you consider acceptable?
Stevens noted, "The decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one's privacy as possible.... On occasion, quite apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her message simply because they do not like its proponent."
Your reply illustrates exactly what I mean, and just reinforces my question... how did the Libertarian party become equated with "death by salmonella"?
By repeatedly advocating for the abolition of the FDA. (e.g. Here. Most commonly, it's done under the evidence-free belief that the FDA causes more harm than good protecting Americans from unsafe drugs, but there are a handful that also think food safety is just more nanny state tyranny.)
How did a party that says "People should be free to live their lives and take responsibility for their lives" become the "idiotic" party that screams "government control is bad bad bad"?
You tell me. Why is the libertarian solution to every difficult problem to "let the market sort it out?" The environment? Public health and safety? Unfair contracts and predatory lending? "Let the market sort it out!" And if the market managed to tread on someone while "sorting it out," then it's solely that person's fault for not making the wisest possible purchasing decision based on their total freedom to consider it in a vacuum with their perfect knowledge of the market. We are all >homo economicus!
"Act responsibly" is just a cop-out for blaming the victim when someone takes advantage of you. Drink contaminated milk? Well, shame on you for not doing your research and intelligently picking another brand! (Even if the contamination wasn't reported to anybody.) And if all products in an industry are contaminated with something except for a handful of "luxury" versions, then obviously that contamination is good because of how it lowers the price and makes the product more available. The market has spoken.
This is the sort of attitude that many vocal libertarians have that makes people roll their eyes at the party for being completely divorced from reality. The Libertarian Party is the party of no public education, no health and safety organizations, no social security, no public medicine, and no other help for the impoverished at all; no protections for workers, no restrictions on contracts, and no protection against racial or religious discrimination. Try to boil yourselves down to being "pro-freedom" and "pro-responsibility" and everyone will agree with those principles, but explain what you actually think they mean and people will run away in horror.
[A]nd if they find nothing, all they say is oops, sorry, and you have no recourse.
Look up Section 1983 claims sometime. The usual recourse in a 4th Amendment case is to suppress evidence against you in trial taken by illegitimate means, but if there are no charges, you can independently sue the government for violation of your civil rights via 42 USC 1983, and plaintiffs do win in cases where the police acted unreasonably.
You know, we act facetious on here when we joke about "freedom and liberty is dead" and all that, but the fact remains that we're living in a very scary place when "quoting the Constitution" is considered grounds for suspicion of being a terrorist...
Well, it sounds pretty terrible until you consider that fetishized worship of the Constitution (or more accurately some very out-there interpretations of it) is a HUGE part of the right-wing subculture that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols belonged to and the one Eric Rudolph belonged to. There's a difference between having a lot of respect for the Constitution and basically treating it like you would a religious document for a cult.
Remember, the survivalist / gun show / militia crowd is the only fanatical US-native subculture that has pulled off a major act of mass murder in the states. There came a point in McVeigh's life where he believed so strongly in his interpretation of the Constitution and so strongly in how wrong the government was that he killed or injured nearly a 1000 people. I mean, geez, I really hate to support what they're saying about people who gather quotes from the the founders and refer to the Constitution a lot, but it's not like they're wrong about some of the most dangerous forms of domestic terrorists.
Perhaps we should have another party devoted to things like preserving an individuals Liberties.
And maybe when we do it this time, we could make a party that's interested in personal liberties without having a hard-on for economic policy that would return us all to Social Darwinism and the Guilded Age.
By reading this post you agree to pay me 1,000,000 USD.
This is why lay people are so cute when they talk about contracts.
First, you didn't give an opportunity to review the offer before acceptance was performed. This is completely different from EULAs where you are forced to read the contract before you can use or install it. You can return a piece of software if you refuse to install or use it, but I can't "unread" the sentence. Furthermore, reading the contract generally can't be considered an affirmative action which a reasonable, objective third-party would believe constitutes a desire to be bound by the contract.
Second, there's no offer and thus no consideration. I got nothing in exchange for the fee you demanded. "Contracts" without consideration, much less those without even an offer, are not contracts.
Third, it's a contract of adhesion, which does not make it inherently invalid but may come into play for unconscionability, where there is "an absence of meaningful choice on the part of one party due to one-sided contract provisions, together with terms which are so oppressive that no reasonable person would make them and no fair and honest person would accept them," as it's often phrased.
There's no contract because of the first two, and the would be strong grounds to knock it out on the third point even if there were.
More notably, the concept of EULA itself might not stand up in court. If you want a legal tact, I suggest that one. EULAs are unfair and should be attacked at the core (didn't an EU court recently rule that EULAs weren't binding?). You bought the thing, you're installing a copy of your own, and that's that. Done. There are already laws preventing you from redistributing it and the like. No EULA is needed. Does a movie or music album come with such a thing? No. Should software? No.
That argument might be tough depending on where you are in light of ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.ed 1447 (7th Cir., 1996). That court upheld a "shrinkwrap license" (aka EULA), on the grounds that the box notified the user that there was a license which must be agreed to before the product could be used. In other words, it was part of the terms of sale that you would have to accept the license.
The court also noted that warranties shipped in a box, sight unseen, are honored by every state (as opposed to the default UCC warranty when none is expressed), notes that the UCC allows sellers to come up with other terms of contract acceptance other than just buying the box (citing UCC 2-204(1)), and notes that a customer is free to return a product whose terms are unacceptable (with the kind of funny scenario of a box that has a surprise message saying "you now owe us an extra $10,000" which a customer can refuse by returning the product).
Full text of the decision, if you're interested. Courts are very split on whether to follow this decision or not.
I agree. The best defense along these lines would be a system that randomly clicks your screen (in a random place, at a somewhat infrequent interval) all the time. When you have a license to bypass, leave it open and walk away (perhaps put another window over the "I disagree" button). It'll eventually get bypassed. Even this is stupid, and even this might not stand up in court.
Yeah, that wouldn't matter. All that would matter is whether an objective third-party would have enough evidence to believe that you intended to perform the action necessary for acceptance; in this case that would be the installation of the software.
I'm honestly unsure if you can recklessly perform acceptance, but most courts would consider this kind of trick, especially if repeated when it failed, to show that the person was substantially certain that the accepting act would occur and indeed intended for it to happen.
As noted in other replies, this is largely mooted if the EULA states that use is acceptance, and you use the software afterwards.
As I recall, cats in New York city are officially classified as wild animals as they can't be trained or something. Therefore one could argue that cats are not in fact property.
An interesting point, but no more relevant than if you set up a device to accept a EULA whenever the wind blows north-by-northwest, as long as you left the computer in state where it could be pretty clear to an objective third-party that you wanted the software to be installed by a device of for that exact purpose.
Also mooted if you use the software after installation. (See most EULAs.)
Now, if your cat somehow gets the disk in the drive, installs the software himself, and completely uses it himself, and you've got enough proof for a jury or judge to become convinced that the cat was actually the only one to perform *any* of the actions that manifest acceptance of a EULA, you might have a victory.
But I think the device in this article clearly provides proof otherwise.
I think you're probably right. Still, before stating a legal opinion, you really should state your legal training or (I assume) lack thereof.
Fair enough. I am not a lawyer, but I am a law student who has had Contracts (a did decently in the class). I've never seen case law on the matter, but I remember asking a similar question to my professor about machine-assisted acceptance, and it's really about manifesting the intent to accept the agreement.
Most EULAs start off with language like the following:
YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS EULA BY INSTALLING, COPYING, OR OTHERWISE USING THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, DO NOT INSTALL, COPY, OR USE THE SOFTWARE; YOU MAY RETURN IT TO YOUR PLACE OF PURCHASE FOR A FULL REFUND, IF APPLICABLE.
(Text copied from the Windows XP Home Edition EULA.)
Thus the contract has set forth the method of acceptance. If you perform actions that a rational, objective third-party would assume manifests agreement to these terms, then you have accepted the contract. If your cat-based device -- that you set up -- installs the software for you, that alone probably manifests acceptance (if by a strange, Rube Goldberg-esque manner), because most people, when presented with the facts of cat as property, would say that you "installed" the software.
(Aside: If you use the software after installation, that definitely manifests acceptance, rendering the entire matter moot.)
This is pretty much basic offer and acceptance material.
A cat is property, not an individual. Animal law has been quite unsuccessful in breaking out of that mold. So, no, a cat can't make a legal agreement anymore than your keyboard and mouse can.
However, the cat here is just a tool for you to accept the agreement. If you set up a device to automatically agree to a license without you fully reading it, you've still manifested an intent to accept the terms, whatever they may be. I don't think a court would have anymore problem with holding you to the contract than if you used machine to automatically stamp a signature on a stack of paper contracts. It wouldn't matter if it worked on a timer, on a RNG, or on the fickle movements of a cat so long as you set it up to happen with certainty that it would eventually happen (because you can't proceed with the installation without it happening).
I looked it up, from "The Devil in the Dark." The quote isn't exactly as it's most commonly said:
KIRK: I see. Mister Spock give us a report on life beneath the surface. SPOCK: Within range of our sensors, there is no life, other than the accountable human residents of this colony beneath the surface. At least, no life as we know it.
If that's it, then it's exactly like the "Elementary, my dear Watson" quote, a common mangling. Also, it means that both posters were wrong. It's neither "Jim" nor "Captain" there. Weird.
Land on Manhattan remains some of the most valuable land on the planet. And he wants to use it for the most land-intensive production imaginable? For the price of an acre on Manhattan, you could buy 100 acres in the Midwest, plus the equipment and personnel to operate it, plus transportation of the final product to NYC.
(emphasis mine)
For now, this is true. But keep in mind that this won a design competition for the dystopian future, and that may include one where we don't have cheap and ubiquitous transportation anymore. Imagine a world where diesel costs $40/gal, and we may see a little bit more "buying local" in the works.
Well, all that aside, the utter impracticability of illuminating the lower levels and the horrible hassle in cleaning, maintaining, and accommodating equipment and personnel within such an irregularly designed building may indicate to you that this is little more than a fantasy art gallery and not an engineered solution.
Okay, this is going to drive me insane. I know I've heard this quote since I was a kid (or a teen at least), so I went online to "prove" to you that that's how it originally was, with "Jim" instead of "Captain" because I was convinced that was the case. One problem: I can't find any evidence that the line or anything like it was actually ever uttered in the series.
Where does this "quote" originate from? You can find variations of it all over the web, but I can't find the source at all. I even found a site that had scripts for TOS, the animated series, and the movies, and I couldn't find any part of the line in a context that resembled the quote. Is this just one of those crazy pop-culture things were a line is attributed to someone who never said it, like now Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson" in any of Doyle's works?
Not being British, I can't really say what the DPA requires or not, but..
I've even demanded that a qualified and certified individual deletes the data, not a minium wage clerk who just presses the delete button. I've even asked for backups to be deleted too. This is part of the DPA - I picked this up from a site that campains agaist using fingerprints in school libraries.
Of course I have no way of checking.
I somehow doubt that your info was deleted off of backups given the difficulty of loading a backup off of tape, finding the records, selectively purging them, and then overwriting the data on the tape with the "cleaned" records, and then doing this for EVERY backup since your account was created.
That just isn't happening. The expense and human resources that would have to be dedicated towards the task means that no company is going through that kind of trouble without a court order, and they'd be very likely to fight that battle in court as hard as possible to avoid having to deal with this kind of request repeatedly.
Why the darn subs don't have at lease one IR camera in front ? Come-on people. Even Nemo's sub had portholes.
Maybe you're unfamiliar with the evolutionary impetus for why the range of light we call the "visible" spectrum is the one our eyes evolved to pick up both in the ocean and in the atmosphere.
Oh, and Nemo's sub was created by the same author who thought we could shoot people to the moon in a giant cannon without killing them. Just FYI.
Could you maybe throw some of your apparently overflowing free time into a cure for cancer, or world peace, or developing DNF? I mean, filks on cult classic Saturday morning cartoons from the mid 90s are great and all... but seriously.
Time cannot be bought, yet is more rationed than wine. Unlike your Mother.
Pretty much that's it, as far as I'm concerned. I think too many people posting in this article didn't even bother reading the summary where it was asking about "spoilers," not what makes the game itself unfun.
Never would've thought of that. As a left-handed person, I still use the mouse with my right hand because that's where everyone else puts it. Also, I'd have to remap the left/right buttons to be able to use my index finger for the majority of clicking.
(Coincidentally, I did use that as my phone password for a while after some Cisco phones at my job barred my traditional "12345" (idiots, luggage) VM password. I've never even really understood a need to secure my VM in the first place, but I digress.)
Bill Gates releases a mossie swarm and he's hailed a a genius and philanthropist. If I did the same I'd probably be arrested on bio-terrorism charges if the powers that be were being hysterical, or if they were being more reasonable public endangerment and or nusance.
Never said life was fair. But it's interesting how we find different halves of that equation unfair.
He had no right to do this. How about one of the people bitten by mossies go to his house and release a whole infestation of fleas, or cockroaches and see how he likes it.
There weren't any real mosquitoes; he was just pretending. Does that change your perspective?
Hey, I'm a big Obama fan, but I never once believed he'd be an improvement on copyright. There are no friends in Congress on that issue. On the one hand, you have Democrats with strong ties to Hollywood. On the other hand, you have Republicans who are just pro-big business in general, and IP is one of America's biggest export industries. No one gives a crap about the average citizen on this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Anonymity is not necessary for free speech.
The Supreme Court has strongly disagreed. Take McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n , 514 U.S. 334 (1995). In the majority opinion, Stevens noted that any attempt to force people to include their identity in their speech was an attempt to regulate the content of the speech.
He stated: ... It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation--and their ideas from suppression--at the hand of an intolerant society. The right to remain anonymous may be abused when it shields fraudulent conduct. But political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, and, in general, our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse.
"Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.
Thomas concurred in the judgment, but he based his reasoning off of a rather fascinating historical analysis (worth a read). Scalia (with Rehnquist on board) was the only dissenter, finding that he could "imagine no reason why an anonymous leaflet is any more honorable, as a general matter, than an anonymous phone call or an anonymous letter. It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of the anonymity." He said that there should be exceptions to protect against a fear of threats or reprisals, but no general rule protecting anonymity.
You should be accountable to your fellow man for what you say. Words are actionable things.
Why? Why should you be "accountable" for your beliefs, and what form of "accounting" do you consider acceptable?
Stevens noted, "The decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one's privacy as possible. ... On occasion, quite apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her message simply because they do not like its proponent."
Why are all of these reasons wrong to you?
Your reply illustrates exactly what I mean, and just reinforces my question... how did the Libertarian party become equated with "death by salmonella"?
By repeatedly advocating for the abolition of the FDA. (e.g. Here. Most commonly, it's done under the evidence-free belief that the FDA causes more harm than good protecting Americans from unsafe drugs, but there are a handful that also think food safety is just more nanny state tyranny.)
How did a party that says "People should be free to live their lives and take responsibility for their lives" become the "idiotic" party that screams "government control is bad bad bad"?
You tell me. Why is the libertarian solution to every difficult problem to "let the market sort it out?" The environment? Public health and safety? Unfair contracts and predatory lending? "Let the market sort it out!" And if the market managed to tread on someone while "sorting it out," then it's solely that person's fault for not making the wisest possible purchasing decision based on their total freedom to consider it in a vacuum with their perfect knowledge of the market. We are all >homo economicus!
"Act responsibly" is just a cop-out for blaming the victim when someone takes advantage of you. Drink contaminated milk? Well, shame on you for not doing your research and intelligently picking another brand! (Even if the contamination wasn't reported to anybody.) And if all products in an industry are contaminated with something except for a handful of "luxury" versions, then obviously that contamination is good because of how it lowers the price and makes the product more available. The market has spoken.
This is the sort of attitude that many vocal libertarians have that makes people roll their eyes at the party for being completely divorced from reality. The Libertarian Party is the party of no public education, no health and safety organizations, no social security, no public medicine, and no other help for the impoverished at all; no protections for workers, no restrictions on contracts, and no protection against racial or religious discrimination. Try to boil yourselves down to being "pro-freedom" and "pro-responsibility" and everyone will agree with those principles, but explain what you actually think they mean and people will run away in horror.
[A]nd if they find nothing, all they say is oops, sorry, and you have no recourse.
Look up Section 1983 claims sometime. The usual recourse in a 4th Amendment case is to suppress evidence against you in trial taken by illegitimate means, but if there are no charges, you can independently sue the government for violation of your civil rights via 42 USC 1983, and plaintiffs do win in cases where the police acted unreasonably.
You know, we act facetious on here when we joke about "freedom and liberty is dead" and all that, but the fact remains that we're living in a very scary place when "quoting the Constitution" is considered grounds for suspicion of being a terrorist...
Well, it sounds pretty terrible until you consider that fetishized worship of the Constitution (or more accurately some very out-there interpretations of it) is a HUGE part of the right-wing subculture that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols belonged to and the one Eric Rudolph belonged to. There's a difference between having a lot of respect for the Constitution and basically treating it like you would a religious document for a cult.
Remember, the survivalist / gun show / militia crowd is the only fanatical US-native subculture that has pulled off a major act of mass murder in the states. There came a point in McVeigh's life where he believed so strongly in his interpretation of the Constitution and so strongly in how wrong the government was that he killed or injured nearly a 1000 people. I mean, geez, I really hate to support what they're saying about people who gather quotes from the the founders and refer to the Constitution a lot, but it's not like they're wrong about some of the most dangerous forms of domestic terrorists.
Perhaps we should have another party devoted to things like preserving an individuals Liberties.
And maybe when we do it this time, we could make a party that's interested in personal liberties without having a hard-on for economic policy that would return us all to Social Darwinism and the Guilded Age.
By reading this post you agree to pay me 1,000,000 USD.
This is why lay people are so cute when they talk about contracts.
First, you didn't give an opportunity to review the offer before acceptance was performed. This is completely different from EULAs where you are forced to read the contract before you can use or install it. You can return a piece of software if you refuse to install or use it, but I can't "unread" the sentence. Furthermore, reading the contract generally can't be considered an affirmative action which a reasonable, objective third-party would believe constitutes a desire to be bound by the contract.
Second, there's no offer and thus no consideration. I got nothing in exchange for the fee you demanded. "Contracts" without consideration, much less those without even an offer, are not contracts.
Third, it's a contract of adhesion, which does not make it inherently invalid but may come into play for unconscionability, where there is "an absence of meaningful choice on the part of one party due to one-sided contract provisions, together with terms which are so oppressive that no reasonable person would make them and no fair and honest person would accept them," as it's often phrased.
There's no contract because of the first two, and the would be strong grounds to knock it out on the third point even if there were.
More notably, the concept of EULA itself might not stand up in court. If you want a legal tact, I suggest that one. EULAs are unfair and should be attacked at the core (didn't an EU court recently rule that EULAs weren't binding?). You bought the thing, you're installing a copy of your own, and that's that. Done. There are already laws preventing you from redistributing it and the like. No EULA is needed. Does a movie or music album come with such a thing? No. Should software? No.
That argument might be tough depending on where you are in light of ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg , 86 F.ed 1447 (7th Cir., 1996). That court upheld a "shrinkwrap license" (aka EULA), on the grounds that the box notified the user that there was a license which must be agreed to before the product could be used. In other words, it was part of the terms of sale that you would have to accept the license.
The court also noted that warranties shipped in a box, sight unseen, are honored by every state (as opposed to the default UCC warranty when none is expressed), notes that the UCC allows sellers to come up with other terms of contract acceptance other than just buying the box (citing UCC 2-204(1)), and notes that a customer is free to return a product whose terms are unacceptable (with the kind of funny scenario of a box that has a surprise message saying "you now owe us an extra $10,000" which a customer can refuse by returning the product).
Full text of the decision, if you're interested. Courts are very split on whether to follow this decision or not.
I agree. The best defense along these lines would be a system that randomly clicks your screen (in a random place, at a somewhat infrequent interval) all the time. When you have a license to bypass, leave it open and walk away (perhaps put another window over the "I disagree" button). It'll eventually get bypassed. Even this is stupid, and even this might not stand up in court.
Yeah, that wouldn't matter. All that would matter is whether an objective third-party would have enough evidence to believe that you intended to perform the action necessary for acceptance; in this case that would be the installation of the software.
I'm honestly unsure if you can recklessly perform acceptance, but most courts would consider this kind of trick, especially if repeated when it failed, to show that the person was substantially certain that the accepting act would occur and indeed intended for it to happen.
As noted in other replies, this is largely mooted if the EULA states that use is acceptance, and you use the software afterwards.
As I recall, cats in New York city are officially classified as wild animals as they can't be trained or something. Therefore one could argue that cats are not in fact property.
An interesting point, but no more relevant than if you set up a device to accept a EULA whenever the wind blows north-by-northwest, as long as you left the computer in state where it could be pretty clear to an objective third-party that you wanted the software to be installed by a device of for that exact purpose.
Also mooted if you use the software after installation. (See most EULAs.)
Now, if your cat somehow gets the disk in the drive, installs the software himself, and completely uses it himself, and you've got enough proof for a jury or judge to become convinced that the cat was actually the only one to perform *any* of the actions that manifest acceptance of a EULA, you might have a victory.
But I think the device in this article clearly provides proof otherwise.
I think you're probably right. Still, before stating a legal opinion, you really should state your legal training or (I assume) lack thereof.
Fair enough. I am not a lawyer, but I am a law student who has had Contracts (a did decently in the class). I've never seen case law on the matter, but I remember asking a similar question to my professor about machine-assisted acceptance, and it's really about manifesting the intent to accept the agreement.
Most EULAs start off with language like the following:
YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS EULA BY INSTALLING, COPYING, OR OTHERWISE USING THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, DO NOT INSTALL, COPY, OR USE THE SOFTWARE; YOU MAY RETURN IT TO YOUR PLACE OF PURCHASE FOR A FULL REFUND, IF APPLICABLE.
(Text copied from the Windows XP Home Edition EULA.)
Thus the contract has set forth the method of acceptance. If you perform actions that a rational, objective third-party would assume manifests agreement to these terms, then you have accepted the contract. If your cat-based device -- that you set up -- installs the software for you, that alone probably manifests acceptance (if by a strange, Rube Goldberg-esque manner), because most people, when presented with the facts of cat as property, would say that you "installed" the software.
(Aside: If you use the software after installation, that definitely manifests acceptance, rendering the entire matter moot.)
This is pretty much basic offer and acceptance material.
Can a cat make a legal agreement?
A cat is property, not an individual. Animal law has been quite unsuccessful in breaking out of that mold. So, no, a cat can't make a legal agreement anymore than your keyboard and mouse can.
However, the cat here is just a tool for you to accept the agreement. If you set up a device to automatically agree to a license without you fully reading it, you've still manifested an intent to accept the terms, whatever they may be. I don't think a court would have anymore problem with holding you to the contract than if you used machine to automatically stamp a signature on a stack of paper contracts. It wouldn't matter if it worked on a timer, on a RNG, or on the fickle movements of a cat so long as you set it up to happen with certainty that it would eventually happen (because you can't proceed with the installation without it happening).
The researchers were able to easily bypass the biometric authentication system built into the laptops by using photos of an authorized user [...]
Tragically, sadly obvious. Not even a hack, really.
I looked it up, from "The Devil in the Dark." The quote isn't exactly as it's most commonly said:
KIRK: I see. Mister Spock give us a report on life beneath the surface.
SPOCK: Within range of our sensors, there is no life, other than the accountable human residents of this colony beneath the surface. At least, no life as we know it.
If that's it, then it's exactly like the "Elementary, my dear Watson" quote, a common mangling. Also, it means that both posters were wrong. It's neither "Jim" nor "Captain" there. Weird.
Land on Manhattan remains some of the most valuable land on the planet. And he wants to use it for the most land-intensive production imaginable? For the price of an acre on Manhattan, you could buy 100 acres in the Midwest, plus the equipment and personnel to operate it, plus transportation of the final product to NYC.
(emphasis mine)
For now, this is true. But keep in mind that this won a design competition for the dystopian future, and that may include one where we don't have cheap and ubiquitous transportation anymore. Imagine a world where diesel costs $40/gal, and we may see a little bit more "buying local" in the works.
Well, all that aside, the utter impracticability of illuminating the lower levels and the horrible hassle in cleaning, maintaining, and accommodating equipment and personnel within such an irregularly designed building may indicate to you that this is little more than a fantasy art gallery and not an engineered solution.
Okay, this is going to drive me insane. I know I've heard this quote since I was a kid (or a teen at least), so I went online to "prove" to you that that's how it originally was, with "Jim" instead of "Captain" because I was convinced that was the case. One problem: I can't find any evidence that the line or anything like it was actually ever uttered in the series.
Where does this "quote" originate from? You can find variations of it all over the web, but I can't find the source at all. I even found a site that had scripts for TOS, the animated series, and the movies, and I couldn't find any part of the line in a context that resembled the quote. Is this just one of those crazy pop-culture things were a line is attributed to someone who never said it, like now Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson" in any of Doyle's works?
Not being British, I can't really say what the DPA requires or not, but..
I've even demanded that a qualified and certified individual deletes the data, not a minium wage clerk who just presses the delete button. I've even asked for backups to be deleted too. This is part of the DPA - I picked this up from a site that campains agaist using fingerprints in school libraries.
Of course I have no way of checking.
I somehow doubt that your info was deleted off of backups given the difficulty of loading a backup off of tape, finding the records, selectively purging them, and then overwriting the data on the tape with the "cleaned" records, and then doing this for EVERY backup since your account was created.
That just isn't happening. The expense and human resources that would have to be dedicated towards the task means that no company is going through that kind of trouble without a court order, and they'd be very likely to fight that battle in court as hard as possible to avoid having to deal with this kind of request repeatedly.
I just don't see it as practical.
Why the darn subs don't have at lease one IR camera in front ? Come-on people. Even Nemo's sub had portholes.
Maybe you're unfamiliar with the evolutionary impetus for why the range of light we call the "visible" spectrum is the one our eyes evolved to pick up both in the ocean and in the atmosphere.
Oh, and Nemo's sub was created by the same author who thought we could shoot people to the moon in a giant cannon without killing them. Just FYI.
Personally, I think he should adopt a bunch of cats AND put out the poison. But I guess this is why I'm not a consultant.
Could've fooled me! (Or at least one of my former bosses.)
Could you maybe throw some of your apparently overflowing free time into a cure for cancer, or world peace, or developing DNF? I mean, filks on cult classic Saturday morning cartoons from the mid 90s are great and all... but seriously.
Time cannot be bought,
yet is more rationed than wine.
Unlike your Mother.
And your subject doesn't work if you pronounce it "doubleyew-tee-eff". :P
What you say is true.
My space was limited but,
you know what I meant.
Personally I /BEE-OSS/
always said it as
in days now long past.
Haiku boots quickly
similar to BeOS
now with GCC!
Haikus are tricky. /BEE-OSS/ or /BEE-OH-ESS/
Is
the way to say it?
Pretty much that's it, as far as I'm concerned. I think too many people posting in this article didn't even bother reading the summary where it was asking about "spoilers," not what makes the game itself unfun.
Never would've thought of that. As a left-handed person, I still use the mouse with my right hand because that's where everyone else puts it. Also, I'd have to remap the left/right buttons to be able to use my index finger for the majority of clicking.
(Coincidentally, I did use that as my phone password for a while after some Cisco phones at my job barred my traditional "12345" (idiots, luggage) VM password. I've never even really understood a need to secure my VM in the first place, but I digress.)
Bill Gates releases a mossie swarm and he's hailed a a genius and philanthropist. If I did the same I'd probably be arrested on bio-terrorism charges if the powers that be were being hysterical, or if they were being more reasonable public endangerment and or nusance.
Never said life was fair. But it's interesting how we find different halves of that equation unfair.
He had no right to do this. How about one of the people bitten by mossies go to his house and release a whole infestation of fleas, or cockroaches and see how he likes it.
There weren't any real mosquitoes; he was just pretending. Does that change your perspective?
Hey, I'm a big Obama fan, but I never once believed he'd be an improvement on copyright. There are no friends in Congress on that issue. On the one hand, you have Democrats with strong ties to Hollywood. On the other hand, you have Republicans who are just pro-big business in general, and IP is one of America's biggest export industries. No one gives a crap about the average citizen on this issue.