Being a slave in Roman territory was NOT the same thing as being a slave in America. Much closer to the system of indentured servitude a la Johnny Tremaine. You had rights. You could potentially become a citizen. Slavery in Rome was BAD, slavery in America was EVIL.
The offences of slaves were punished with severity and frequently the utmost barbarity. One of the mildest punishments was the removal from the familia urbana to the rustica, where they were obliged to work in chains or fetters (Plaut. Most. i.1.18; Ter. Phorm. ii.1.20). They were frequently beaten with sticks or scourged with the whip (of which an account is given under Flagrum), but these were such every-day punishments, that many slaves ceased almost to care for them: thus Chrysalus says (Plaut. Bacchid. ii.3.131), "Si illi sunt virgae ruri, at mihi tergum est domi."
Runaway slaves (fugitivi) and thieves (fures) were branded on the forehead with a mark (stigma), whence they are said to be notati or inscripti (Mart. viii.75.9). Slaves were also punished by being hung up by their hands with weights suspended to their feet (Plaut. Asin. ii.2.37, 38), or by being sent to work in the Ergastulum or Pistrinum. [Ergastulum; Mola.] The carrying of the furca was a very common mode of punishment. [Furca.] The toilet of the Roman ladies was a dreadful ordeal to the female slaves, who were often barbarously punished by their mistresses for the slightest mistake in the arrangement of the hair or a part of the dress (Ovid. Am. i.14.15, Ar. Am. iii.235; Mart. ii.66; Juv. vi.498, &c.).
Masters might work their slaves as many hours in the day as they pleased, but they usually allowed them holidays on the public festivals. At the festival of Saturnus in particular, special indulgences were granted to all slaves, of which an account is given under Saturnalia.
Here's some of the fun stuff you could look forward to in Rome as a slave:
Your owner decides he needs a eunich, so he has your balls cut off, and possibly your penis amputated (in the latter case, you have a 50% chance of not surviving) - you have no say in the matter;
Your owner likes your wife, he fucks you have no say in the matter;
Your owner likes your daugher, he fucks her - you have no say in the matter;
Your owner likes your son, he fucks him - you have no say in the matter;
Your owner needs some cash and sells off your wife - you have no say in the matter;
Your owner decides that your pregnant wife shouldn't have had a kid, he "exposes" the kid - you have no say in the matter;
Your owner sends you to the arena to fight to the death for his friends amusement - you have no say in the matter;
Your owner beats you, big deal, you're property. If the beating is "intolerable" he has to sell you (some "punishment fitting the crime") - you have no say in the matter;
You are prohibited from owning anything - all your property becomes the property of your owner.
So, you say this was only "BAD"? Doesn't sound too much different from slavery in America, but that's never stopped "christian apologists" from mischaracterization and outright lies, as we're still seeing with the whole "Intelligent Design" crapfest.
Also, last time I looked, many of the congresscritters (congress and senate) came from those 17 states that allow bestiality, so they have no legal impediment to screwing the pooch back home when they're not fucking the dog in Washington.
If youhad RTFA, you'd have found they're sneaking this in the back door.
"Apparently you have to read the fine print, because there is no mention of a service contract during the setup phase on tivo.com."
Also, they're making it so that even if you bought and paid for your TIVO a year ago, and paid full price, with no discounts or incentives, buying another one will make you have to agree to the $150 cancellation penalty PER MACHINE.
That's bullshit. You can't unilaterally alter a pre-existing contract. It would be like buying a second cell phone on a second line, and being charged an early cancellation fee on both lines if you changed services, even though your first cell line is already fully-amortized.
or have their contracts terminated by TiVo, will be forced to pay a $150 early termination fee
Take the consumers' money
Cancel their agreement the next day, before providing any services
Another $150 PROFIT!
Sounds fishy to me that they get to break the agreement, and the CONSUMER is penalized. It should be whoever breaks the agreement owes the other party. If its the consumer, they ante up $150. If its TIVO, Tivo should have to have the same obligation. After all, a contract is a contract. Whichever party breaks it should compensate the other party.
Since Jesus didn't have much to say on the subject of homosexuality, despite ranting at length on other matters, I assume He didn't find it all that abhorrent.
s/homosexuality/slavery/g;
Then add the new testament teachings about how if you become a believer while being a slave, don't bitch about being a slave, even if its a fellow christian who owns you.
Funny how "Da Man", the "Big JC", "God the Son" had fewer moral scruples than Honest Abe Lincoln when it came to slavery. All sorts of "teachings", and not 3 words: "free the slaves." Yep, "Love your neighbour as yourself" - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" - except if he or she is a slave.
Jesus wouldn't free the slaves - it took a REAL man to do that!
ENUMCLAW -- Authorities are reviewing hundreds of hours of videotapes seized from a rural Enumclaw-area farm that police say is frequented by men who engage in sex acts with animals.
The videotapes police have viewed thus far depict men having sex with horses, including one that shows a Seattle man shortly before he died July 2, said Enumclaw police Cmdr. Eric Sortland. Police are reviewing the tapes to make sure no laws have been broken.
"Activities like these are often collateral sexual crimes beyond the animal aspect," said Sortland, adding that investigators want to make sure crimes such as child abuse or forcible rape were not occurring on the property.
Washington is one of 17 states that does not outlaw bestiality
They won't pass laws against this, but they will go after consentual sex between adults. Maybe they should put that Brown guy from FEMA in charge - then nothing will be done about it.
Instead of wasting time with what goes on in bedrooms between consenting adults, they should be investigating graft, corruption, etc., in Foggy Bottom. They could start with Halliburton. BTW, they STILL haven't explained how Jeff Gannon (google Bush's man-date) got his press pass.
The average chinese citizen already has access to "technology" to get around the filters - after all, LOTS of the spam we get is from them.
They'll search for and write about "fr33d0m", or "d3m0cr4t1c", or "1 p3rs0n, 1 v0t3".
Or they'll create their own "free-speek", as opposed to "l33t-sp34k".
Lets face it, subcultures are good at producing their own language to communicate with that are impenetrable to the overlords.
The mafia, the hells angels, etc. all have their internal language to make sure that anyone overhearing them on a wiretap doesn't get the real message.
We're having a party over at Joe's (the buy location). Jake's bringing a couple of king cans (2 kilos of coke) and 4 6-packs (24 kilos of marijuana), and you're expected to bring 5 bags of chips ($50,000) as your contribution. It's an invite-only party (don't bring your fucking hanger-ons again) - anyone not on the "A List" will be show the door (we'll kill them) as opposed to getting their free ticket to the baseball game(beating them up with a baseball bat).
Well, right now I'm on the phone with someone whose computer was sent out today because because her computer is infected - again - and her up-to-date symantec antivirus says it can't remove the latest bug, and says she has to re-install...
So don't even try to pretend people love Windows - they use it because that's what they've got, and don't know any better.
So there's someone else who's getting a knoppix boot dvd...
Uncyclopedia stands for everything Wikipedia cannot have: misinformation, satire, and lies
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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Actually, historically, what they did was boosted the price of a retail licence much faster than they did the OEM licenses. This created a market for oem licenses.
However, it was only in the last decade that they tried to impose this "non-transferrable" bs. Before that, it didn't matter whether it was retail or oem, as long as you gave ALL the materials in the transfer, it was not a problem. Same with compilers, etc.
Of course, what that meant was that, when their box died, people bought new white box hardware and used their old license. No copyright infringement, no unfair use, but it was a potential cash cow to try to get people to buy new copies with every new piece of hardware, rather than recycle their old copies, as the law allows.
Remember, the only reason the retail cost is at the price level it is at is because of Microsofts' illegal monopolistic practices. Otherwise, the retail price would be more like the OEM price, and the OEM price would be even less.
Remember, OEM just means "Original Equipment Manufacturer". There's nothing different to the end user in terms of legal rights, etc.
As for "ruining it for everyone", I would be quite happy to see Microsoft come up with a way to bullet-proof their license enforcement, and jack up their prices "to teh moon". Far from poisoning the well, it would encourage people to look at the true long-term costs of being a captive.
Hey, maybe I should volunteer to help them make their product activation and licensing scheme more secure... me and my buds can probably come up with something a bit better...
What's even worse are the 14 year olds that consider you really old.
Hey, everybody - Jerry Lee Lewis posts on slashdot.
BTW, you know we still think you're a sleeze for marrying your 13-year-old cuz. Now why couldn't you be like that god-fearin' boy Jimmy Swaggart and just settle for a good old-fashioned whore or two?
Mid-life crisis, you buy stuff to make you feel better (Microsofts' bought LOTS of stuff over the years).
Cranky old spinster is more like it. Throwing chairs, continually trying to evoke the ghost of the good old days, complaining that nobody gives them the respect they think they still deserve, upset that everyone is going all googley-eyed for those who are younger, prettier, cooler, sexier.
Now we see the aging dame getting some cosmetic surgery, trying to put a new face on the old battleaxe. Unfortunately, in both looks and code, beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone.
Sure, she can still get a date. She has money. There are those who are quite willing to play the part of Deuce Bigelow, male gigolo. But she knows that her bedmates are only in it for the bucks, they may be with her physically, but mentally they're miles away, wondering how they can "get lucky" with the new prom queen, and worried that they may never be able to because of the "Ewww - you slept with HER?" factor.
Stay tuned for the next installment - "Microsoft Windows - Vampire Edition", where a deal with the devil is quickly done, and for some reason users are feeling drained (well, more than usual)...
Kai-Fu Lee and the iPod represent MS's biggest problems, they have nothing to worry about.
If those were the only 2, you'd be right. But there are going to be more "Kai-Fu Lee" and "iPod" problems. Microsofts problem is that they didn't see either one until it hit, and now that they're openly wounded, its going to happen again and again.
When's the last time you read about a company ceo throwing a chair just because somebody quit?
Gaming consoles are an area where they have in fact done okay
They've never made a profit from the xbox, and, to quote their 10k filing:
price reductions in the second half of fiscal 2004 related to the late stage of the Xbox lifecycle are expected to lead to lower revenue for the Xbox business.
Microsfots profits are from Windows and Office, and they're both coming under attack as well.
YOu can have a 9-disk raid if you want,or even a 50-disk raid of raids (ouch). The only problem is, as the number of disks goes up, the likelyhood of near-simultaneous failure of more than one disk goes up, too.
Sort of like the bad old days of tube computers. If you had 4000 tubes, and they had an average lifespan of 8000 hours, you'd be lucky, on average, to get 2 hours of uptime before one burned out. Then , since you had to keep the tubes "lit" so you could find the dead one, by the time you replaced it you were lucky to get 15 minutes of runtime before another one blew.
Its like the shuttle engines. They spend so much time testing each one that by the time it's ready for launch, they've already used up 90% of their rated burn time. Google for Feinman's report for more info on NASAs bs flight practices. Seems NASA and Microsoft have some similarities in management.
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
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Flash, Meet Sparkle
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And, if you don't mind me asking, how MANY of those 20 years you've been a legal adult, or at least, over 18? Have you spent *any* time yet over 18?
... I think you can do the math from the rest of this post...
I think I got the message across that I have zero respect for the crap marketspeak that Microsoft pushes. Then again, when they wre releasing 95 to the public, a bunch of us were invited to the developers' roadshow. Everyone else went, and came back with free Win95 and Office95 CDs. They were all going "see, you should have come with us". I told them that I had already learned from long before that Microsoft never gets anything right until at least the 3rd version, and that Windows 95 would be the same, so why waste my time... I had already seen it with the Win3x series, and with DOS, and the abortion known as Microsoft Office.
And, of course, I was right. Microsoft has a great business model - treat people like mushrooms - keep them in the dark and keep piling the shit on them really thick. Only an idiot goes along willingly with that. But, as HL Mencken said, nobody every went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Believe what you want about Microsoft, but they have a vested interest in keeping people on the upgrade treadmill by continually releasing buggy software, and telling them "... next version will address that issue..."
If US agents get caught kidnapping someone on foreign soil, don't be surprised if its considered an act of war, and they end up being treated as spies (since they obviously would be out of uniform).
Officially-sanction breaches of another country's sovereignty have often been considered as acts of war. Having a domestic law that "authorizes" it only means that they can't be extradited if they manage to pull it off.
As it emerged that the bombing was a deliberate act of sabotage, there was little doubt in Greenpeace minds who was responsible. Two days after the bombing the French Embassy in Wellington issued a statement echoing the flat denials emanating from Paris. 'In no way is France involved,' it declared. 'The French Government doesn't deal with its opponents in such ways.' But within a few days police had arrested French secret service agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur as they tried to return their van to an Auckland hire company. While they were held in custody, the charter yacht Ouvea, carrying another team of agents implicated in the bombing, sailed to Norfolk Island and then disappeared a few days out to sea heading north for Tahiti. Her crew was reportedly picked up by the French nuclear submarine Rubis, which turned up in Tahiti on July 22 - the first time a French nuclear submarine had been known to enter the South Pacific.
The international outcry pressured the French Government into setting up its own inquiry. After less than three weeks the head of the inquiry, Bernard Tricot, a former Director-General of the Elysee Palace, announced, 'On the basis of the information available to me at this time, I do not believe there was any French responsibility.' The French agents caught in New Zealand were merely there to spy on Greenpeace, Tricot implied, not to bomb them.
Hostility towards the French Government grew after President Mitterrand threatened that any protesters at Moruroa that year would be arrested, and refused to meet with Greenpeace International director, David McTaggart. Rather than cool the growing international controversy, the transparently inadequate Tricot report served only to fuel the fires of indignation and further undermine the French Government's credibility, so that a second inquiry was ordered on 5 September, but it was already too late.
Following claims in the London Sunday Times that President Mitterrand had known of the bombing plan, and implicitly, therefore had authorised it, French Defence Minister Charles Hernu resigned and Admiral Pierre Lacoste, director of the DGSE, France's intelligence and covert action bureau, was sacked. Within days Prime Minister Fabius admitted French secret service agents had bombed the Rainbow Warrior under orders. It was, said New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange, nothing more than 'a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism'.
Charged with murder and arson, on 4 November Mafart and Prieur, just two of a much larger team of saboteurs, pleaded guilty in the High Court at Auckland to lesser charges of manslaughter and wilful damage and were each sentenced to ten years' jail. Their guilty plea ensured that the facts of the police investigation would never be made public. In June 1986, in a political deal presided over by the United Nations Secretary-General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, France agreed to pay compensation of NZ$13 million (US$6.5 million) to New Zealand and 'apologise', in return for which Mafart and Prieur would be detained at the French military base on Hao atoll for three years.
To cap it all, the two spies were both free by May 1988, after less than two years had elapsed, Mafart having been smuggled out
Remember, if you officially sanction kidnapping people form other countries, don't be surprised if the other countries retaliate. Of course
They're all STILL slow as shit in comparison to native code. Don't get me started on the bullshit "benchmarks" of java's "hotspot compiler" - its nowhere near there yet. And don't forget, the coding model of java, and the absurd "everything is an object", is going to keep java code sub-optimal under the hood forever.
But back on-topic...
After all, the topic is Vista. It gives nothing to the Joe 6Pack you mention - if all he wants to do is surf the web and do email, all he needs is a web appliance. He needs to organize it? Give him a gmail account and he doesn't even have to worry about administering his own email.
Next - the problem with presenting an "is it okay to do this" dialog to Joe6pack, as opposed to the "sudo" of the *nixes, is that there are so many apps out in windows-land that require admin rights, as opposed to *nixland that require root rights. So joe6pack is going to be clicking "ok" a lot more than the *nix guy/gal. Its not like people are going to simultaneously spend thousands on upgrading their apps *again* when they buy a Vista box. So not much is going to change in that respect over the rest of the decade.
it's very difficult to go back and find that one crucial email from a year and a half ago that you need for some upcoming meeting
Well, since you don't want me to be an anti-gui bigot (fgrep:-), just dump it all into google mail. Or some other webmail that includes half-decent searches. Or better yet, spend some time on organizing and maintaining your filing system (note - I said filing, not file).
I have a 10-dvd backup sitting to the right of my keyboard. Last night I needed to find a user manual I had written, and it was on one of those dvds, along with about 40 gigs of other stuff. Sure, it took me 5 minutes to find it, but a lot of that was "pop the dvd in, look at it - nope, it wouldn't be on this one". Why so long? Because the dvds are labeled "backup", not with their contents, which would NOT fit on the label. It was easier for me to grab the backups from the office Friday and search them from home last night, knowing I'd also have the other 2 gigs of relevent data and apps close at hand.
So, to each their own. But I'll bet that most of the people who like the Windows Way also don't bother backing up their files - its not like they even know where they are... and that's my point. A good search doesn't replace a decent understanding of the file system, and the knowledge allows you to leverage your computer in other ways (such as knowing what to back up).
Speaking of which, its a lot easier to back up/etc/* and then beat on the config files to your hearts' content than it is to work with the registry. Also, as the registry grows, parsing it out takes longer and longer.
Eventually, there's going to have to be a "binary xml", where either fixed-length records are used, with an index into them, or the current variable-length records, but again, an index, with all the associated stuff (buckets, overflow records, etc.) I'll stick with multiple plain text config files - they'll always be faster to read/write, and they keep me from having a single point of failure.
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
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Flash, Meet Sparkle
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It's bad semantics to say that fair use and first sale are "exceptions" to copyright law, in that without either of these "exceptions", there would be no incentive for the masses to obey copyright law in the first place. Its a balancing act, and over the long haul people just won't go along with a bad law.
My original point was that the bs from microsoft, that your oem license lives and dies with your machine, is just bs. Just like the notice that says you must attach that little sticker to the box you've installed xp on.
As for the lack of case law to support my position, you're looking at it from a US-centric point of view - other jurisdictions (such as Germany) have said that first sale applies, and that you can sell your oem to anyone, provided you sell it ALL, and don't keep a copy for yourself.
Microsofts' blatant attempt to force people to buy a new copy instead of just using their old copy when their old hardware dies (product "activation" if your hardware changes too much) is just another example of how Bill considers it HIS computer, not yours.
Stallman is right. It IS about freedom, not cost. I'm willing to live with reasonable compromises, and pay a reasonable fee for a reasonable license. I've got tons of licensed software from my pre-linux days. What I'm not willing to accept heavy-handed extortion from "corporate overlords", and this is one reason why I will never again be a willing customer of Microsoft. Any time there is an alternative, even if it requires a bit more effort up-front on my part, I'll use it.
When businesses warp the balances that copyright law established, to attempt to make it more one-sided, some of us *are* going to kick back. If and when my jurisdiction ever comes out with a DMCA-like law, I will ignore it, and actively encourage others to do the same, just like I had no problems grabbing a picket sign and protesting other stupidities I felt strongly about.
So, in summary (and back to the original point) Microsoft historically (from the DOS days through the mid-90s) didn't even try to claim that oem licenses couldn't be moved from box to box - they just required, as per copyright law, that ALL copies be transferred, including backups. This "non-transferability of oem licenses" is just another cash grab. The ProCD judgment says nothing about this, and until a case says otherwise, Microsoft can declaim it all they want, only sheeple will listen.
Seems to me that if physical presence gives them jurisdiction, that
it should also give them jurisdiction over the crime of committing a kidnapping;
since parties to a crime are not allowed to profit from it, that prosecutors, judges, etc where the defendent has been kidnapped should be barred from collecting a salary for the jurisdiction of the trial and any appeals;
since the prosecution has committed crimes in the case, their credibility and that of their witnesses should never be assumed - in other words, it should be presumed that they are willing to perjure themselves, falsify evidence, etc., as they no longer have clean hands
... but that would smack too much of activist judges... (sigh)
Re:EULAs and Returnability of opened software.
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Flash, Meet Sparkle
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Notice how many places get around the OEM "requirement" by selling you a mouse, or a power cord, or even a dead motherboard and cpu?
icrosoft doesn't go after them because:
its not illegal
money is money
it keeps their market share high by giving people who would never spend the full retail another price point to buy at
Byte code interpreters suck. They sucked with USCD Pascal, they still suck with java, and they'll suck just as much under all the crls that ms want to throw at you.
Also, their proposed solution to admin-all-the-time, of having people run as a regular user by default and pop up a dialog box confirming that they want to install software or change things as an admin user is not going to work. Look how many people click OK to everything.
The registry problem would be easier to fix by killing off the whole registry.
Glad to see that we agree that they should end the lie about IE being a core component of the OS. It's not, and grafting it into everything so they could pretend it was, was a stupid idea.
Then again, it's okay for OS X to be all about the eye candy, but not Windows? Hypocrisy at its finest, I guess.
Nah, I still enjoy the ease of use of vim, mc, grep, tin, wget,/etc/,... I just feel that eye candy has taken up too much time and space that should be devoted to other things.
People haven't changed since Win3.0. They still spend way too much time on fixing their wallpaper, html-izing their email, etc. Its funny to see people wanting 23" wide-screen monitors because they don't have enough room on a 19" monitor to display all the icons on their desktop.
It's sick. This is the real useability problem. People not taking 10 minutes to learn what a file system is and how to use it.
Windows attempts to isolate the users from the underlying file system have aggravated this (as evinced by the "everything is on the desktop - somewhere" problem).
Get rid of the "desktop" and "my computer", and open up the underlying fs, and you've killed several problems at once. But that's not "glitzy", so it will never happen.
The debian people probably see it along the lines of generating goodwill, interest, and free publicity for debian linux in general.
It works. After all, didn't YOU (and who knows how many others, me included) click on it?
Re:How can you vouche for the security of this?
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Flash, Meet Sparkle
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This is actually turning into an interesting discussion. Hopefully, I'll be able to spell out in clearer fashion WHY the ProCD decision has nothing to do with the validity of EULAs that try to limit your right to dispose of your software bundle:-) If you're not trolling, I apologize.
ProCD does NOT speak to the validity of an EULA limiting rights that you have under copyright law.
In the ProCD case - the buyer went well beyond his first purchase/copyright rights. He could have entered into an agreement, as provided by the EULA, to *extend* his rights far beyond those contempleted by first-purchase/copyright. ProCd offerd that option on the CD.
I'll say it again. The ProCD EULA license was an offer to have additional rights beyond those granted to every purchaser by first purchase and/or copyright. If the ProCD offer hadn't been included, in other words, if there had been NO EULA, NOTHING WOULD HAVE CHANGED from a legal point of view... the buyer would still have been going beyond his first purchase/copyright fair use rights in reselling the copyrighted information.
Sorry for the shouting, but this MUST be emphasized, because everyone has been so bamboozled by the whole EULA issue, but that's why anyone using the ProCD case as an argument for EULAs is practicing a "look at the wookie" argument. They fail to note what would happen absent an EULA, and that the outcome would have been the same.
All the EULA did, in this case, was:
affirm the purchasers right to use the data in accordance with first purchase and copyright law (in other words you can use it, but you don't have the right to make and sell copies of it)
if you want to go beyond your statutory rights, if you want to sell portions of it, (something that first purchase and copyright don't let you do), you can, and here's the deal...
The defendant lost because, even absent an EULA, he would have been guilty. He was selling multiple copies of portions of their material.
This is what, incredibly, nobody who quotes the case bothers to look at.
So the ProCD case was never one where an EULA trumped first purchase or fair use copyright law. It was a case where someone wanted to go further than these rights allowed, and, rather than enter into an agreement, decided to pirate.
Its not complicated, but, again, most people have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees (guess that's why there's so much spaghetti code out there).
Slashdot Mirror
Here's some of the fun stuff you could look forward to in Rome as a slave:
- Your owner decides he needs a eunich, so he has your balls cut off, and possibly your penis amputated (in the latter case, you have a 50% chance of not surviving) - you have no say in the matter;
- Your owner likes your wife, he fucks you have no say in the matter;
- Your owner likes your daugher, he fucks her - you have no say in the matter;
- Your owner likes your son, he fucks him - you have no say in the matter;
- Your owner needs some cash and sells off your wife - you have no say in the matter;
- Your owner decides that your pregnant wife shouldn't have had a kid, he "exposes" the kid - you have no say in the matter;
- Your owner sends you to the arena to fight to the death for his friends amusement - you have no say in the matter;
- Your owner beats you, big deal, you're property. If the beating is "intolerable" he has to sell you (some "punishment fitting the crime") - you have no say in the matter;
- You are prohibited from owning anything - all your property becomes the property of your owner.
So, you say this was only "BAD"? Doesn't sound too much different from slavery in America, but that's never stopped "christian apologists" from mischaracterization and outright lies, as we're still seeing with the whole "Intelligent Design" crapfest.Slavery is never acceptable.
Also, last time I looked, many of the congresscritters (congress and senate) came from those 17 states that allow bestiality, so they have no legal impediment to screwing the pooch back home when they're not fucking the dog in Washington.
That's bullshit. You can't unilaterally alter a pre-existing contract. It would be like buying a second cell phone on a second line, and being charged an early cancellation fee on both lines if you changed services, even though your first cell line is already fully-amortized.
- Take the consumers' money
- Cancel their agreement the next day, before providing any services
- Another $150 PROFIT!
Sounds fishy to me that they get to break the agreement, and the CONSUMER is penalized. It should be whoever breaks the agreement owes the other party. If its the consumer, they ante up $150. If its TIVO, Tivo should have to have the same obligation. After all, a contract is a contract. Whichever party breaks it should compensate the other party.Then add the new testament teachings about how if you become a believer while being a slave, don't bitch about being a slave, even if its a fellow christian who owns you.
Funny how "Da Man", the "Big JC", "God the Son" had fewer moral scruples than Honest Abe Lincoln when it came to slavery. All sorts of "teachings", and not 3 words: "free the slaves." Yep, "Love your neighbour as yourself" - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" - except if he or she is a slave.
Jesus wouldn't free the slaves - it took a REAL man to do that!
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/20 02384648_farm16m.html
They won't pass laws against this, but they will go after consentual sex between adults. Maybe they should put that Brown guy from FEMA in charge - then nothing will be done about it.Instead of wasting time with what goes on in bedrooms between consenting adults, they should be investigating graft, corruption, etc., in Foggy Bottom. They could start with Halliburton. BTW, they STILL haven't explained how Jeff Gannon (google Bush's man-date) got his press pass.
They'll search for and write about "fr33d0m", or "d3m0cr4t1c", or "1 p3rs0n, 1 v0t3".
Or they'll create their own "free-speek", as opposed to "l33t-sp34k".
Lets face it, subcultures are good at producing their own language to communicate with that are impenetrable to the overlords.
The mafia, the hells angels, etc. all have their internal language to make sure that anyone overhearing them on a wiretap doesn't get the real message.
So don't even try to pretend people love Windows - they use it because that's what they've got, and don't know any better.
So there's someone else who's getting a knoppix boot dvd ...
However, it was only in the last decade that they tried to impose this "non-transferrable" bs. Before that, it didn't matter whether it was retail or oem, as long as you gave ALL the materials in the transfer, it was not a problem. Same with compilers, etc.
Of course, what that meant was that, when their box died, people bought new white box hardware and used their old license. No copyright infringement, no unfair use, but it was a potential cash cow to try to get people to buy new copies with every new piece of hardware, rather than recycle their old copies, as the law allows.
Remember, the only reason the retail cost is at the price level it is at is because of Microsofts' illegal monopolistic practices. Otherwise, the retail price would be more like the OEM price, and the OEM price would be even less.
Remember, OEM just means "Original Equipment Manufacturer". There's nothing different to the end user in terms of legal rights, etc.
As for "ruining it for everyone", I would be quite happy to see Microsoft come up with a way to bullet-proof their license enforcement, and jack up their prices "to teh moon". Far from poisoning the well, it would encourage people to look at the true long-term costs of being a captive.
Hey, maybe I should volunteer to help them make their product activation and licensing scheme more secure ... me and my buds can probably come up with something a bit better ...
BTW, you know we still think you're a sleeze for marrying your 13-year-old cuz. Now why couldn't you be like that god-fearin' boy Jimmy Swaggart and just settle for a good old-fashioned whore or two?
Mid-life crisis, you buy stuff to make you feel better (Microsofts' bought LOTS of stuff over the years).
Cranky old spinster is more like it. Throwing chairs, continually trying to evoke the ghost of the good old days, complaining that nobody gives them the respect they think they still deserve, upset that everyone is going all googley-eyed for those who are younger, prettier, cooler, sexier.
Now we see the aging dame getting some cosmetic surgery, trying to put a new face on the old battleaxe. Unfortunately, in both looks and code, beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone.
Sure, she can still get a date. She has money. There are those who are quite willing to play the part of Deuce Bigelow, male gigolo. But she knows that her bedmates are only in it for the bucks, they may be with her physically, but mentally they're miles away, wondering how they can "get lucky" with the new prom queen, and worried that they may never be able to because of the "Ewww - you slept with HER?" factor.
Stay tuned for the next installment - "Microsoft Windows - Vampire Edition", where a deal with the devil is quickly done, and for some reason users are feeling drained (well, more than usual) ...
When's the last time you read about a company ceo throwing a chair just because somebody quit?
YOu can have a 9-disk raid if you want,or even a 50-disk raid of raids (ouch). The only problem is, as the number of disks goes up, the likelyhood of near-simultaneous failure of more than one disk goes up, too.
Sort of like the bad old days of tube computers. If you had 4000 tubes, and they had an average lifespan of 8000 hours, you'd be lucky, on average, to get 2 hours of uptime before one burned out. Then , since you had to keep the tubes "lit" so you could find the dead one, by the time you replaced it you were lucky to get 15 minutes of runtime before another one blew.
Its like the shuttle engines. They spend so much time testing each one that by the time it's ready for launch, they've already used up 90% of their rated burn time. Google for Feinman's report for more info on NASAs bs flight practices. Seems NASA and Microsoft have some similarities in management.
I think I got the message across that I have zero respect for the crap marketspeak that Microsoft pushes. Then again, when they wre releasing 95 to the public, a bunch of us were invited to the developers' roadshow. Everyone else went, and came back with free Win95 and Office95 CDs. They were all going "see, you should have come with us". I told them that I had already learned from long before that Microsoft never gets anything right until at least the 3rd version, and that Windows 95 would be the same, so why waste my time ... I had already seen it with the Win3x series, and with DOS, and the abortion known as Microsoft Office.
And, of course, I was right. Microsoft has a great business model - treat people like mushrooms - keep them in the dark and keep piling the shit on them really thick. Only an idiot goes along willingly with that. But, as HL Mencken said, nobody every went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Believe what you want about Microsoft, but they have a vested interest in keeping people on the upgrade treadmill by continually releasing buggy software, and telling them "... next version will address that issue ..."
Officially-sanction breaches of another country's sovereignty have often been considered as acts of war. Having a domestic law that "authorizes" it only means that they can't be extradited if they manage to pull it off.
Look at the dustup between France and New Zealand http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/rw/pkbomb.html
Remember, if you officially sanction kidnapping people form other countries, don't be surprised if the other countries retaliate. Of course
But back on-topic ...
After all, the topic is Vista. It gives nothing to the Joe 6Pack you mention - if all he wants to do is surf the web and do email, all he needs is a web appliance. He needs to organize it? Give him a gmail account and he doesn't even have to worry about administering his own email.
Next - the problem with presenting an "is it okay to do this" dialog to Joe6pack, as opposed to the "sudo" of the *nixes, is that there are so many apps out in windows-land that require admin rights, as opposed to *nixland that require root rights. So joe6pack is going to be clicking "ok" a lot more than the *nix guy/gal. Its not like people are going to simultaneously spend thousands on upgrading their apps *again* when they buy a Vista box. So not much is going to change in that respect over the rest of the decade.
Well, since you don't want me to be an anti-gui bigot (fgrepI have a 10-dvd backup sitting to the right of my keyboard. Last night I needed to find a user manual I had written, and it was on one of those dvds, along with about 40 gigs of other stuff. Sure, it took me 5 minutes to find it, but a lot of that was "pop the dvd in, look at it - nope, it wouldn't be on this one". Why so long? Because the dvds are labeled "backup", not with their contents, which would NOT fit on the label. It was easier for me to grab the backups from the office Friday and search them from home last night, knowing I'd also have the other 2 gigs of relevent data and apps close at hand.
So, to each their own. But I'll bet that most of the people who like the Windows Way also don't bother backing up their files - its not like they even know where they are ... and that's my point. A good search doesn't replace a decent understanding of the file system, and the knowledge allows you to leverage your computer in other ways (such as knowing what to back up).
Speaking of which, its a lot easier to back up /etc/* and then beat on the config files to your hearts' content than it is to work with the registry. Also, as the registry grows, parsing it out takes longer and longer.
Eventually, there's going to have to be a "binary xml", where either fixed-length records are used, with an index into them, or the current variable-length records, but again, an index, with all the associated stuff (buckets, overflow records, etc.) I'll stick with multiple plain text config files - they'll always be faster to read/write, and they keep me from having a single point of failure.
My original point was that the bs from microsoft, that your oem license lives and dies with your machine, is just bs. Just like the notice that says you must attach that little sticker to the box you've installed xp on.
As for the lack of case law to support my position, you're looking at it from a US-centric point of view - other jurisdictions (such as Germany) have said that first sale applies, and that you can sell your oem to anyone, provided you sell it ALL, and don't keep a copy for yourself.
Microsofts' blatant attempt to force people to buy a new copy instead of just using their old copy when their old hardware dies (product "activation" if your hardware changes too much) is just another example of how Bill considers it HIS computer, not yours.
Stallman is right. It IS about freedom, not cost. I'm willing to live with reasonable compromises, and pay a reasonable fee for a reasonable license. I've got tons of licensed software from my pre-linux days. What I'm not willing to accept heavy-handed extortion from "corporate overlords", and this is one reason why I will never again be a willing customer of Microsoft. Any time there is an alternative, even if it requires a bit more effort up-front on my part, I'll use it.
When businesses warp the balances that copyright law established, to attempt to make it more one-sided, some of us *are* going to kick back. If and when my jurisdiction ever comes out with a DMCA-like law, I will ignore it, and actively encourage others to do the same, just like I had no problems grabbing a picket sign and protesting other stupidities I felt strongly about.
So, in summary (and back to the original point) Microsoft historically (from the DOS days through the mid-90s) didn't even try to claim that oem licenses couldn't be moved from box to box - they just required, as per copyright law, that ALL copies be transferred, including backups. This "non-transferability of oem licenses" is just another cash grab. The ProCD judgment says nothing about this, and until a case says otherwise, Microsoft can declaim it all they want, only sheeple will listen.
icrosoft doesn't go after them because:
- its not illegal
- money is money
- it keeps their market share high by giving people who would never spend the full retail another price point to buy at
They have their cake and eat it too.Now back to our regular programming ...
Byte code interpreters suck. They sucked with USCD Pascal, they still suck with java, and they'll suck just as much under all the crls that ms want to throw at you.
Also, their proposed solution to admin-all-the-time, of having people run as a regular user by default and pop up a dialog box confirming that they want to install software or change things as an admin user is not going to work. Look how many people click OK to everything.
The registry problem would be easier to fix by killing off the whole registry.
Glad to see that we agree that they should end the lie about IE being a core component of the OS. It's not, and grafting it into everything so they could pretend it was, was a stupid idea.
Nah, I still enjoy the ease of use of vim, mc, grep, tin, wget,People haven't changed since Win3.0. They still spend way too much time on fixing their wallpaper, html-izing their email, etc. Its funny to see people wanting 23" wide-screen monitors because they don't have enough room on a 19" monitor to display all the icons on their desktop.
It's sick. This is the real useability problem. People not taking 10 minutes to learn what a file system is and how to use it.
Windows attempts to isolate the users from the underlying file system have aggravated this (as evinced by the "everything is on the desktop - somewhere" problem).
Get rid of the "desktop" and "my computer", and open up the underlying fs, and you've killed several problems at once. But that's not "glitzy", so it will never happen.
It works. After all, didn't YOU (and who knows how many others, me included) click on it?
ProCD does NOT speak to the validity of an EULA limiting rights that you have under copyright law.
In the ProCD case - the buyer went well beyond his first purchase/copyright rights. He could have entered into an agreement, as provided by the EULA, to *extend* his rights far beyond those contempleted by first-purchase/copyright. ProCd offerd that option on the CD.
I'll say it again. The ProCD EULA license was an offer to have additional rights beyond those granted to every purchaser by first purchase and/or copyright. If the ProCD offer hadn't been included, in other words, if there had been NO EULA, NOTHING WOULD HAVE CHANGED from a legal point of view ... the buyer would still have been going beyond his first purchase/copyright fair use rights in reselling the copyrighted information.
Sorry for the shouting, but this MUST be emphasized, because everyone has been so bamboozled by the whole EULA issue, but that's why anyone using the ProCD case as an argument for EULAs is practicing a "look at the wookie" argument. They fail to note what would happen absent an EULA, and that the outcome would have been the same.
All the EULA did, in this case, was:
The defendant lost because, even absent an EULA, he would have been guilty. He was selling multiple copies of portions of their material.
This is what, incredibly, nobody who quotes the case bothers to look at.
So the ProCD case was never one where an EULA trumped first purchase or fair use copyright law. It was a case where someone wanted to go further than these rights allowed, and, rather than enter into an agreement, decided to pirate.
Its not complicated, but, again, most people have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees (guess that's why there's so much spaghetti code out there).
Hope this clears things up a bit.