And don't get me started on that Socrates guy - even HE knows that he knows nothing! Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies: he must have been a complete idiot.
I know the government is starving with only a few trillion dollars a year to keep it afloat, but that might not be the only reason we're not seeing the performance we'd like out of it. I'd start by looking at incumbency rates, and the lazy voters who prop them up. I'll grant you that a monopoly controlled by citizens is better than a monopoly controlled by shareholders, but only to the extent that those citizens can and do exercise their control wisely.
A couple years earlier, a small group of murderers with a handful of commercial jets had managed to immediately drive Cheney into a hole^H^H^H^H^H undisclosed location and Bush into underground shelter. A couple years later, it just took a single report of an off-course plane to send Bush underground again. Was it so tactically unreasonable to expect Saddam to hide from a hundred thousand men armed with the best military technology in the world?
Even if this was propaganda for the Iraqis' benefit, it seems like condescending propaganda. Go for the root of the problem, and persuade people that a strongman ruler is illegitimate if he isn't democratically supported and/or if he violates human rights. Don't just cop out and try to paint yourself as the stronger man.
Why would OpenOffice.org find mismatching libraries, even after an in-place upgrade of running software?
If I install an executable, it's dynamically linked to/usr/lib/libwhatever.so.n, I run it, and then I upgrade/usr/lib/libwhatever.so.n while the program is still running, the running executable is *still* using the old version of the file, which is still on the disk - even though it's been deleted from/usr/lib, the reference from the running program prevents it from being erased until the program quits.
A decade ago when glibc was in regular flux and I was reluctant to reboot my computer even for the most basic upgrades, I think at one point I had nearly half a dozen different versions of libc.so itself running together, without noticing any broken apps or even weird behavior...
Of course, it's possible to do fancy things that screw this up, but that's how the simplest library linking works. Why would OpenOffice go to extra trouble to make their software less functional? I don't disbelieve you. I've seen how Firefox gets hosed when it's upgraded while running, for example. I'm just curious as to what the failure mechanism is and why it isn't treated as a bug to be fixed. Windows has slowly been getting better at allowing upgrades and configuration changes without unnecessary restarts. It would be sad if Linux (or even Windows-centered free software with Linux ports) was regressing, even a little.
If it weren't for the genocide being inflicted on the citizens by its own government
And there you go. The West talks a good game about wanting to stop genocide, and recently we've settled on "bringing democracy to an oppressed people" as the favorite rationale for an invasion of someone who we named along with North Korea on an "Axis of Evil". Why wouldn't North Korea be afraid that they might have been next on the target list?
Anyway, it seems clear that their strategy for preventing invasion worked. Did we invade Iraq because their people were more oppressed than the North Koreans? Obviously not. Did we invade because Iraq was more of a WMD threat? Just the opposite.
it means we should damned well disarm to put everyone on an equal footing.
To elaborate, "put everyone on an equal footing" would mean "give everyone an equal chance to be the first to covertly regain a nuclear arms monopoly and rule the world". Mutually Assured Destruction sucks, but at least it offers an incentive not to begin any nuclear destruction at all. The last time no such incentive existed, about 210,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki residents didn't like the result.
And yet in context, we got lucky. Despite a headstart from the Nazis, the first nukes instead ended up in the hands of a country whose most ambitious "rule the world" dreams were to force the unconditional surrender of and then peacefully rebuild a country whose imperial ambitions had just murdered millions. Are you sure every nuclear-capable country today (the US included) would be so restrained? I suspect North Korea wouldn't be.
IIRC they had major problems in the initial release, but the first couple weeks of updates fixed them. Similar situation with 6.0, I believe.
And then after that Red Hat and Fedora were both pretty stable (surprisingly so for the latter's "bleeding edge" philosophy), right up until Fedora 9...
At least Fedora 10 works. It's not up to their usual standards (my home PC lost surround sound for some reason I haven't found time to look into), but after 9, having it function at all was a huge relief. My personal experiences with 9 included a fresh laptop install that barely worked, and a few attempted upgrades at work that were literally rendered unbootable thanks to critical missing libraries.
I don't think we will ever be able to run a tank or a fighter jet off of electricity alone.
We could do so right now, if we really had to. For example, electrolysis of water produces hydrogen, the Sabatier process adds carbon dioxide and gives you methane, steam reforming gets you back to carbon monoxide and hydrogen, Fischer-Tropsch gives you alkanes, and then you just pour your synthetic diesel and kerosene into the same tanks and jets that you were fueling with fossil fuels before. All the technology is at least half a century old. Historically it normally couldn't compete with just sticking a pump in the ground and sucking oil out, but that would change if there were no fossil fuels left in the ground.
In the meantime there are intermediate options too. Oil will run out before natural gas or coal do, and you can start with one or both of the latter to shave a bit of expense off the "start with water, CO2, and electricity" methods.
It's a shame none of this gets much press. Using electricity to synthesize chemical fuel is exactly how the overhyped "hydrogen economy" is supposed to work, except that synthetic liquid hydrocarbons could work with existing vehicles, whereas hydrogen is a questionable choice for spaceships and an outright bad choice for anything lower tech.
The Libertarians want you to realize that people can efficiently and honorably Haz their own Cheezeburgers. The allegories are subtle: you can rely on the Invisible Hand of the market to bring your Invisible Sandwich, and you can do it all without empowering the dangerous surveillance state metaphorically represented by Ceiling Cat Watching You.
What I wish these extremist nuts would understand is that the theory of evolution does not, ipso facto, rule out the possibility of a supernatural creator.
They don't care. What terrifies them is that it rules out the possibility of their specific creator - the guy who purportedly dictated all that stuff about "every winged fowl" being created one day before "every thing that creepeth on the earth", etc. Some people's entire lives are based on the idea that the rules they follow are divine guidance leading them along the strait and narrow path of God's plan. It's not enough for them just to know that there might still be a God, not if the Book in which they trusted Him to provide the foundation of their guidance turns out to be literally mixed with myth from page 1.
You're right that most Christians aren't literalists, and for good reason. Christ taught in parables! It shouldn't be *too* hard to accept that another few Bible stories turned out to be allegorical at best. But that's a scary slope for literalists to look down, because where do you stop? Do you just toss out Adam, Noah, and the other stories that are easy for science to disprove? Or do you start applying the same skepticism to every claim that science can't currently confirm? Were the stories of Abraham, Moses, etc. another "creation myth", on par with Romulus and Remus? How much of the Gospels is fact and how much has been exaggerated or distorted? And if "It's in my scriptures, so it's true" suddenly fails you, what new epistemology tells you where to draw the line?
He's been crazy for years. My first exposure to his loony ideas was in that old story of his, "The Right To Read". He wrote that when I'd just entered college and just started using this "GNU" stuff, and I remember being being stunned by his paranoia. Grade schools wasting time preaching about intellectual property? Software being outlawed for being able to edit RAM that someone else's program allocated? People who didn't have the root passwords for their own computers? And then there's the central point of the story, that eventually people would be stuck with books they couldn't lend or resell! That Stallman guy was clearly a nutjob.
Is there some reason you didn't include telling them about this and saying they math was too hard for the class.
That was the "magic-algebraic-formula" option: give them the results of the calculus without trying to teach them why those results are what they are. (Not because the calculus is "too hard", just because odds are the whole class hasn't learned it yet)
the ball landed on the X (within experimental error)
Was it just experimental error? These calculations often leave out rotational energy - a sphere's moment of inertia is.4mr^2, so when rolling its rotational energy is.2mv^2. So if you're calculating a ball's velocity from the E=.5mv^2 of a non-rotating mass, you'll overestimate it by sqrt(1.4).
I'm not sure what the best way around that is. Wait for the kids to have enough calculus to integrate and understand moments of inertia? Give them "2/5 m r^2" as a magic-algebraic-formula to memorize? Pretend that your velocity overestimation was purely friction and experimental error?
Personally I'm a big proponent of making the kids all learn their calculus and get off my lawn, but I'm not sure that's the right philosophy to get youngsters enthused about science.
Except that the shareholders win. After all, in a highly liquid stock market they can simply sell their stocks as soon as the short-term gains cause the stock price to temporarily rise.
So shareholders that can tell the difference between short and long-term gains, and sell their stock when they see the former at the expense of the latter, are rewarded; whereas shareholders who see a short-term gain, then buy the stock without looking to the long-term, are punished?
Sounds like a good system to me. Of course it's not pleasant that, when 51% of people make bad decisions, 51% of them are punished for it... but it could be worse. In some systems when 51% of people make bad decisions, 100% of them are punished for it.
Compared to most Futurama, yeah. It wasn't any worse than "That's Lobstertainment" or "A Leela of Her Own", though.
but the rest were pretty damn good. I thought Bender's Game was completely back on form for Futurama.
Not quite. Bender's Big Score (at least parts of it) put together an enthralling plot that tugged at the heartstrings. And Bender's Game managed to keep the jokes hilarious, original, and steady. But by the time they were in full swing, the original Futurama episodes were managing to do both those things simultaneously.
Leela: "Acting like a moron won't bring your dog back." Fry: "Then all hope is lost."
What really bothers me is the idea that someone writing a Linux-only program would already have run into situations where they had to conditionally compile code. Has Linux really fragmented that much?
Huh? C++ has even fragmented that much. If you use an old enough STL, you at least have binary trees available in std::map. If you're using a current standard library, you have hash tables in std::unordered_map. If you want to use hash tables whenever possible on any of the compilers in between, you have a mess like this:
#if defined(LIBMESH_HAVE_UNORDERED_MAP) # include <unordered_map> #elif defined(LIBMESH_HAVE_TR1_UNORDERED_MAP) # include <tr1/unordered_map> #elif defined(LIBMESH_HAVE_HASH_MAP) # include <hash_map> #elif defined(LIBMESH_HAVE_EXT_HASH_MAP) # include <ext/hash_map> #else # include <map> #endif
Plus autoconf macros or some such to get the defines right.
The Blizzard vs Bnetd case established that without a EULA specifically authorizing one to make that copy, it is illegal.
No, Blizzard vs Bnetd just established the same thing that other DMCA cases established: even if you're not violating any copyrights, you can still get beaten down by any expensive lawyer who manages to convince a judge that your tool makes it easier for someone else to violate copyrights.
Especially if you get an incompetent judge. Read the decision. It actually says that the EULA is only enforceable because first sale doctrine doesn't apply, but first sale doctrine doesn't apply because the EULA says there wasn't a sale. Apparently that stuff that happened at the cash register wasn't enough evidence to break through the wall of circular reasoning.
'free for private use, but you have to pay $$ fee to use it commercially'
That *still* wouldn't fall under the open source definition; "you can't use this in business" was just shorthand. You can use any open source software commercially, and as long as you don't try to tack on extra restrictions you can even redistribute any open source software commercially. Red Hat's legal ability to charge money is the norm, not the exception.
Oh, and just because something isn't open source by the definition you posted, doesn't mean that it isn't advertised as 'open source' elsewhere.
This is true, and a very good point. OSI gave up on trademarking the phrase "open source" for enforcement purposes; about the best you can do is look for licenses on their approved list if you want something that's already been looked over by experts.
But that's probably not relevant to the anecdote at hand. Somehow I doubt that the soon-to-be-fired lawyer was just worried about Scilab's deceptive marketing but was totally cool with the Apache License and the GPL.
"use of this OSS for personal use is OK but for business use requires you to....."
By definition, a license that tries to say this is not open source.
Contrariwise, many closed source licenses do say something like this. Why wouldn't the lawyer ask for them too?
Gee, I wonder why a lawyer would want to read a contract
A license isn't a contract.
before someone, who is not a lawyer, agreed to use the product
Reading a license before using a product is a very good idea. Reading every license before even considering using any of a wide class of products, particularly when most of those products just use copies of a few of the most generous and standardized licenses in the industry, is a waste of time.
Do they have your signature, do they have a spoken contract, do they even have any communication of acceptance? No, but they don't seem think a judge will require any evidence of agreement before holding you to page after page of "boilerplate" mixed with "gotcha" legalese.
Did they already take your money and give you your product before even showing you a EULA? Yes, but they don't seem think a judge will care about "first sale" doctrine when deciding how valid that EULA is.
Does the EULA offer you any new rights beyond what copyright already allows you to do? Does it offer anything of value in exchange for what they claim you're voluntarily giving away? Usually no, but they don't think judges will bother worrying about "consideration" anyway.
Are they trying to disable the advertised features of their product until and unless you agree to additional terms made after the sale? Yes, but they seem confident that a judge won't invalidate terms agreed to under duress.
And up until now, legal challenges looked like they could go either way. But what if we used a cat? That's foolproof! Surely if a cat clicked the button, no judge would possibly enforce that EULA! That's been clear since Plessy v. Whiskers! Case dismissed!
Slashdot Mirror
And don't get me started on that Socrates guy - even HE knows that he knows nothing! Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies: he must have been a complete idiot.
I know the government is starving with only a few trillion dollars a year to keep it afloat, but that might not be the only reason we're not seeing the performance we'd like out of it. I'd start by looking at incumbency rates, and the lazy voters who prop them up. I'll grant you that a monopoly controlled by citizens is better than a monopoly controlled by shareholders, but only to the extent that those citizens can and do exercise their control wisely.
Bush: "I find it very interesting that when the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole, and you crawled in it."
A couple years earlier, a small group of murderers with a handful of commercial jets had managed to immediately drive Cheney into a hole^H^H^H^H^H undisclosed location and Bush into underground shelter. A couple years later, it just took a single report of an off-course plane to send Bush underground again. Was it so tactically unreasonable to expect Saddam to hide from a hundred thousand men armed with the best military technology in the world?
Even if this was propaganda for the Iraqis' benefit, it seems like condescending propaganda. Go for the root of the problem, and persuade people that a strongman ruler is illegitimate if he isn't democratically supported and/or if he violates human rights. Don't just cop out and try to paint yourself as the stronger man.
Why would OpenOffice.org find mismatching libraries, even after an in-place upgrade of running software?
If I install an executable, it's dynamically linked to /usr/lib/libwhatever.so.n, I run it, and then I upgrade /usr/lib/libwhatever.so.n while the program is still running, the running executable is *still* using the old version of the file, which is still on the disk - even though it's been deleted from /usr/lib, the reference from the running program prevents it from being erased until the program quits.
A decade ago when glibc was in regular flux and I was reluctant to reboot my computer even for the most basic upgrades, I think at one point I had nearly half a dozen different versions of libc.so itself running together, without noticing any broken apps or even weird behavior...
Of course, it's possible to do fancy things that screw this up, but that's how the simplest library linking works. Why would OpenOffice go to extra trouble to make their software less functional? I don't disbelieve you. I've seen how Firefox gets hosed when it's upgraded while running, for example. I'm just curious as to what the failure mechanism is and why it isn't treated as a bug to be fixed. Windows has slowly been getting better at allowing upgrades and configuration changes without unnecessary restarts. It would be sad if Linux (or even Windows-centered free software with Linux ports) was regressing, even a little.
If it weren't for the genocide being inflicted on the citizens by its own government
And there you go. The West talks a good game about wanting to stop genocide, and recently we've settled on "bringing democracy to an oppressed people" as the favorite rationale for an invasion of someone who we named along with North Korea on an "Axis of Evil". Why wouldn't North Korea be afraid that they might have been next on the target list?
Anyway, it seems clear that their strategy for preventing invasion worked. Did we invade Iraq because their people were more oppressed than the North Koreans? Obviously not. Did we invade because Iraq was more of a WMD threat? Just the opposite.
it means we should damned well disarm to put everyone on an equal footing.
To elaborate, "put everyone on an equal footing" would mean "give everyone an equal chance to be the first to covertly regain a nuclear arms monopoly and rule the world". Mutually Assured Destruction sucks, but at least it offers an incentive not to begin any nuclear destruction at all. The last time no such incentive existed, about 210,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki residents didn't like the result.
And yet in context, we got lucky. Despite a headstart from the Nazis, the first nukes instead ended up in the hands of a country whose most ambitious "rule the world" dreams were to force the unconditional surrender of and then peacefully rebuild a country whose imperial ambitions had just murdered millions. Are you sure every nuclear-capable country today (the US included) would be so restrained? I suspect North Korea wouldn't be.
IIRC they had major problems in the initial release, but the first couple weeks of updates fixed them. Similar situation with 6.0, I believe.
And then after that Red Hat and Fedora were both pretty stable (surprisingly so for the latter's "bleeding edge" philosophy), right up until Fedora 9...
At least Fedora 10 works. It's not up to their usual standards (my home PC lost surround sound for some reason I haven't found time to look into), but after 9, having it function at all was a huge relief. My personal experiences with 9 included a fresh laptop install that barely worked, and a few attempted upgrades at work that were literally rendered unbootable thanks to critical missing libraries.
I don't think we will ever be able to run a tank or a fighter jet off of electricity alone.
We could do so right now, if we really had to. For example, electrolysis of water produces hydrogen, the Sabatier process adds carbon dioxide and gives you methane, steam reforming gets you back to carbon monoxide and hydrogen, Fischer-Tropsch gives you alkanes, and then you just pour your synthetic diesel and kerosene into the same tanks and jets that you were fueling with fossil fuels before. All the technology is at least half a century old. Historically it normally couldn't compete with just sticking a pump in the ground and sucking oil out, but that would change if there were no fossil fuels left in the ground.
In the meantime there are intermediate options too. Oil will run out before natural gas or coal do, and you can start with one or both of the latter to shave a bit of expense off the "start with water, CO2, and electricity" methods.
It's a shame none of this gets much press. Using electricity to synthesize chemical fuel is exactly how the overhyped "hydrogen economy" is supposed to work, except that synthetic liquid hydrocarbons could work with existing vehicles, whereas hydrogen is a questionable choice for spaceships and an outright bad choice for anything lower tech.
The Libertarians want you to realize that people can efficiently and honorably Haz their own Cheezeburgers. The allegories are subtle: you can rely on the Invisible Hand of the market to bring your Invisible Sandwich, and you can do it all without empowering the dangerous surveillance state metaphorically represented by Ceiling Cat Watching You.
I've been told that Hurding cats is like trying to control large numbers of some sort of small obstinate animal.
Saying something anonymously is not part of that definition.
Common Sense would indicate otherwise.
What I wish these extremist nuts would understand is that the theory of evolution does not, ipso facto, rule out the possibility of a supernatural creator.
They don't care. What terrifies them is that it rules out the possibility of their specific creator - the guy who purportedly dictated all that stuff about "every winged fowl" being created one day before "every thing that creepeth on the earth", etc. Some people's entire lives are based on the idea that the rules they follow are divine guidance leading them along the strait and narrow path of God's plan. It's not enough for them just to know that there might still be a God, not if the Book in which they trusted Him to provide the foundation of their guidance turns out to be literally mixed with myth from page 1.
You're right that most Christians aren't literalists, and for good reason. Christ taught in parables! It shouldn't be *too* hard to accept that another few Bible stories turned out to be allegorical at best. But that's a scary slope for literalists to look down, because where do you stop? Do you just toss out Adam, Noah, and the other stories that are easy for science to disprove? Or do you start applying the same skepticism to every claim that science can't currently confirm? Were the stories of Abraham, Moses, etc. another "creation myth", on par with Romulus and Remus? How much of the Gospels is fact and how much has been exaggerated or distorted? And if "It's in my scriptures, so it's true" suddenly fails you, what new epistemology tells you where to draw the line?
Careers in German law enforcement: ...
Eh, fill in the blank yourselves. WAY too easy.
He's been crazy for years. My first exposure to his loony ideas was in that old story of his, "The Right To Read". He wrote that when I'd just entered college and just started using this "GNU" stuff, and I remember being being stunned by his paranoia. Grade schools wasting time preaching about intellectual property? Software being outlawed for being able to edit RAM that someone else's program allocated? People who didn't have the root passwords for their own computers? And then there's the central point of the story, that eventually people would be stuck with books they couldn't lend or resell! That Stallman guy was clearly a nutjob.
Is there some reason you didn't include telling them about this and saying they math was too hard for the class.
That was the "magic-algebraic-formula" option: give them the results of the calculus without trying to teach them why those results are what they are. (Not because the calculus is "too hard", just because odds are the whole class hasn't learned it yet)
the ball landed on the X (within experimental error)
Was it just experimental error? These calculations often leave out rotational energy - a sphere's moment of inertia is .4mr^2, so when rolling its rotational energy is .2mv^2. So if you're calculating a ball's velocity from the E=.5mv^2 of a non-rotating mass, you'll overestimate it by sqrt(1.4).
I'm not sure what the best way around that is. Wait for the kids to have enough calculus to integrate and understand moments of inertia? Give them "2/5 m r^2" as a magic-algebraic-formula to memorize? Pretend that your velocity overestimation was purely friction and experimental error?
Personally I'm a big proponent of making the kids all learn their calculus and get off my lawn, but I'm not sure that's the right philosophy to get youngsters enthused about science.
COUNTER-R3VOLUTION
Google Ron Reagan
Well, waiting for cheapie GPGPUs, anyway.
Except that the shareholders win. After all, in a highly liquid stock market they can simply sell their stocks as soon as the short-term gains cause the stock price to temporarily rise.
So shareholders that can tell the difference between short and long-term gains, and sell their stock when they see the former at the expense of the latter, are rewarded; whereas shareholders who see a short-term gain, then buy the stock without looking to the long-term, are punished?
Sounds like a good system to me. Of course it's not pleasant that, when 51% of people make bad decisions, 51% of them are punished for it... but it could be worse. In some systems when 51% of people make bad decisions, 100% of them are punished for it.
Well actually, Beast with a Billion Backs sucked,
Compared to most Futurama, yeah. It wasn't any worse than "That's Lobstertainment" or "A Leela of Her Own", though.
but the rest were pretty damn good. I thought Bender's Game was completely back on form for Futurama.
Not quite. Bender's Big Score (at least parts of it) put together an enthralling plot that tugged at the heartstrings. And Bender's Game managed to keep the jokes hilarious, original, and steady. But by the time they were in full swing, the original Futurama episodes were managing to do both those things simultaneously.
Leela: "Acting like a moron won't bring your dog back."
Fry: "Then all hope is lost."
What really bothers me is the idea that someone writing a Linux-only program would already have run into situations where they had to conditionally compile code. Has Linux really fragmented that much?
Huh? C++ has even fragmented that much. If you use an old enough STL, you at least have binary trees available in std::map. If you're using a current standard library, you have hash tables in std::unordered_map. If you want to use hash tables whenever possible on any of the compilers in between, you have a mess like this:
#if defined(LIBMESH_HAVE_UNORDERED_MAP)
# include <unordered_map>
#elif defined(LIBMESH_HAVE_TR1_UNORDERED_MAP)
# include <tr1/unordered_map>
#elif defined(LIBMESH_HAVE_HASH_MAP)
# include <hash_map>
#elif defined(LIBMESH_HAVE_EXT_HASH_MAP)
# include <ext/hash_map>
#else
# include <map>
#endif
Plus autoconf macros or some such to get the defines right.
Yes, but that copy is specifically allowed by law.
No, Blizzard vs Bnetd just established the same thing that other DMCA cases established: even if you're not violating any copyrights, you can still get beaten down by any expensive lawyer who manages to convince a judge that your tool makes it easier for someone else to violate copyrights.
Especially if you get an incompetent judge. Read the decision. It actually says that the EULA is only enforceable because first sale doctrine doesn't apply, but first sale doctrine doesn't apply because the EULA says there wasn't a sale. Apparently that stuff that happened at the cash register wasn't enough evidence to break through the wall of circular reasoning.
'free for private use, but you have to pay $$ fee to use it commercially'
That *still* wouldn't fall under the open source definition; "you can't use this in business" was just shorthand. You can use any open source software commercially, and as long as you don't try to tack on extra restrictions you can even redistribute any open source software commercially. Red Hat's legal ability to charge money is the norm, not the exception.
Oh, and just because something isn't open source by the definition you posted, doesn't mean that it isn't advertised as 'open source' elsewhere.
This is true, and a very good point. OSI gave up on trademarking the phrase "open source" for enforcement purposes; about the best you can do is look for licenses on their approved list if you want something that's already been looked over by experts.
But that's probably not relevant to the anecdote at hand. Somehow I doubt that the soon-to-be-fired lawyer was just worried about Scilab's deceptive marketing but was totally cool with the Apache License and the GPL.
Using the Preview button after every edit, and adding </i> after every <i>...
"use of this OSS for personal use is OK but for business use requires you to ....."
By definition, a license that tries to say this is not open source.
Contrariwise, many closed source licenses do say something like this. Why wouldn't the lawyer ask for them too?
Gee, I wonder why a lawyer would want to read a contract
A license isn't a contract.
before someone, who is not a lawyer, agreed to use the product
Reading a license before using a product is a very good idea. Reading every license before even considering using any of a wide class of products, particularly when most of those products just use copies of a few of the most generous and standardized licenses in the industry, is a waste of time.
Do they have your signature, do they have a spoken contract, do they even have any communication of acceptance? No, but they don't seem think a judge will require any evidence of agreement before holding you to page after page of "boilerplate" mixed with "gotcha" legalese.
Did they already take your money and give you your product before even showing you a EULA? Yes, but they don't seem think a judge will care about "first sale" doctrine when deciding how valid that EULA is.
Does the EULA offer you any new rights beyond what copyright already allows you to do? Does it offer anything of value in exchange for what they claim you're voluntarily giving away? Usually no, but they don't think judges will bother worrying about "consideration" anyway.
Are they trying to disable the advertised features of their product until and unless you agree to additional terms made after the sale? Yes, but they seem confident that a judge won't invalidate terms agreed to under duress.
And up until now, legal challenges looked like they could go either way. But what if we used a cat? That's foolproof! Surely if a cat clicked the button, no judge would possibly enforce that EULA! That's been clear since Plessy v. Whiskers! Case dismissed!