Amiga was cool but I've had enough GURU MEDITATION ERRORS for one lifetime. The system was just not stable.
Few systems of the time were stable - the Amiga lacked memory protection, so any buggy program could take down the OS, just like many other OSs of the time such as MacOS and DOS. So unless you were running Linux or NT on your 386, this isn't a relevant factor.
"Guru Meditation" was just an early example of how seeing the effect of a crash would give a popular system a bad name even if it wasn't any less stable. People get annoyed at the crash, yet they don't ever have experience of how stable less popular systems are. Just like happened with Windows and the BSOD years later, even now with the NT line that is just as stable as Linux or OS X (indeed, I predicted that this would happen when I saw Windows replacing Amiga in home computing - the token Windows fan poked fun claiming the Amiga was unstable, but I knew the same would happen to Windows as more people used it at home).
For centuries, economists have been arguing that a growing population is essential to a strong economy and culture.... We seriously, urgently need an economy that is not based on growth. For a while, we need one that is based on a shrinking population, and then we need to transition towards one that is based on a roughly constant population. Economists don't like this, but it's a fact of life.
I'm not sure this is true - surely many Western countries have little population growth, or in some cases near zero?
If anything, sudden population growth can be a problem, as decades later you'll have a surge of people who are retired, and the economy can't support them.
I was making was that a sizable portion of the windows using public does not like Vista
citation needed.
Sizable portion of Slashdot maybe. (And I say this as someone who still uses XP and 2000 - but I don't fool myself into thinking that consumers in general are staying away from Vista.)
Presumably if they are basing this off website access, there's no reason they can't list phones alongside PCs.
However it's rather odd, given that many people don't use phones for Internet access (or if they do, only occasionally). And even if the usage was an accurate measure of people who had that phone, listing them in a section of desktop operating systems doesn't really tell us anything useful - I'd much rather see the market share of the Iphone compared with, you know, other phones.
It wouldn't surprise me if Iphone users were more likely to use the Internet than most phone users, simply because if you pay a load of money for a high end phone, you might as well make full use of it. Another point is that I'm not sure how well most phones would identify themselves - especially those that don't run an OS with a brandname. Then there's people like me - I browse on my phone, but all my access will show up as whatever Opera's servers use, because I use Opera Mini.
I don't think listing it as a derivative of Mac OS X would help - firstly it's unclear to me whether the OS really is a derivative, secondly it's misleading to prop up the numbers of a desktop platform with people using a completely separate kind of product.
I'm not sure what's more damning to be honest - that Linux is outdone by a random niche phone, or that it's outdone by even Windows 2000 still. But hey, I know how it feels - I use Opera, which according to them is outdone already by Chrome, and still outdone by Netscape:(
Oddly, they do the same thing with every other product they talk about... your PC (no, I have a mac thanks); your volvo estate (no, I have a skoda thanks); your wall plug (no, I rent my flat, and own no wall plugs at all).
They do it on adverts, sure. I'd rather that Slashdot didn't turn into Slashvertisements - but sadly that does seem the way it's going with the endless Iphone stories...
Why does writing apps for the Iphone save me money? And if you say "or for your "common central points of download".", then there's nothing special about the Iphone is there.
if you still dont get it why dont you get to apple's site, hit the iphone tab, and look through their app store. then you'll see what I'm talking about.
Yes, yet another app store, just like other phones/networks have.
No, I don't get it. Because I have no idea what you're on about.
If someone has realized they can save people in your position a lot of time and money with a mobile phone app, then they might just go with the hottest mobile app distribution method on the planet, which ain't exactly java applets from web sites. (hint: talking about the app store here).
Firstly I'm not sure how this relates to the OP (who said nothing about app stores or other means of distribution). But since you bring it up, plenty of phones have central points of download for applications (often operated by the network providers, for example). The difference is that you aren't forced to use them. And even if they also support native code, they don't shun common platform independent standards such as Java (honestly, any other platform that lacked basic things like Java would be ridiculed, yet for Apple, it's touted as an advantage).
(I'm not sure how the rest of your points relate to his post either, to be honest?)
Ah yes - I couldn't help noticing that people were wanting to put a negative spin on this.
If this was say, Apple, it would be "Look how popular their product is, fans are rushing to download and they can't keep up with the demand!" No one would be picking at their inability to meet that demand.
An clear example would be the reporting of queues for the Iphone 3G - no one dared criticised them for not offering 3G sooner like other companies, or having better store distribution so people weren't having to queue. No, the only spin on it was that queues implied Apple were immensely popular.
I couldn't agree more. I think it's part of the marketing hype that Slashdot and others have fallen to where "On The IpHoNe" - or indeed, "On Your Iphone" makes it newsworthy.
"Ever wished your iPhone could do more than just play some cool games? How about using it to speak into the microphone, and use it as a communication device to talk as if by magic with someone not even in the same room?"
Similarly, it pisses me off that 90% of music docks are ipod-only
Whilst there's no excuse for the lack of standardisation that Apple have encouraged, in this case at least you can't blame the manufacturers as the Ipod is the most popular device. But the Iphone? Sorry, despite the impression one might get from reading Slashdot, it's just one of many phones with much larger companies that have sold billions - and plenty of those phones have for years been doing the "new" things that are advertised, er, reported for the Iphone. That "Ipod" has become synonymous with "mp3 player" is understandable, in the same way it occurred for "Walkman", but trying to do it for the Iphone? That's just annoying.
I don't think quibbling over the details of my example changes the point. Okay, make it my little sister - clearly there are examples where deception is possible without using the Internet. Perhaps the Internet makes it easier, but the point is that it's nothing new.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "persona", but avatars are not living things, nor are they the person themselves. There's no fundamental difference between an avatar or the company logo on a letter, at least in the context of contract law, that we are discussing.
No one comes up to the car and says' Hello BMW. Wanna go on a raid with me and Ford and Chrystler?'.
No one says "Hello Avatar" either. They talk to the person. And if you're talking about games where people role-play someone else, firstly that existed before the Internet too, secondly I don't believe this tends to happen on Second Life, thirdly I don't see how it's connected to the idea of deception. If someone logged in as you and tried to make a contract between you and someone else, the fact that you normally use the account for pretending to be an Elf doesn't change the fact that the contract is clearly not valid.
OOI, do you view all companies as drug dealers for using capitalist means to get people interested in their products, or is it only Microsoft that are bad for doing this?
(And why only talk about drug dealers - do you hate it when bars have a happy hour too?)
Comparing to NN4 is a highly misleading analogy! The stereotype about "people who still run NN4" came about when NN4 was old, and only used by a small number of people, and when newer browsers such as IE 6 and later Opera were available. Suggesting that this is comparable to people who run Vista is ludicrous.
Back in the days when most people ran NN4, are you telling me that they shouldn't have? Were you huddled over your IE 3, telling yourself "It doesn't matter than everyone else runs NN4, it's not relevant"?
They're not really that relevant.
I am not sure what definition of "relevant" you are using. Ignoring NN4 when it was the mainstream browser would have been foolish. Suggesting that any recent version of Windows (yes even 2000, which has more users than Linux for example) is not relevant in the same way as NN4 is ludicrous.
I don't know very many people in this age who don't own a television, but it too is not particularly relevant anymore, and in the same fashion.
In what sense is television not relevant today? And wait - a television is owned by most people, whilst NN4 is used by hardly anyone, and both are not relevant "in the same fashion"? I'm very confused here...
Personally, I don't consider them to be particularly relevant anymore.
I think the comment up above summed it up perfectly: "The geek looks in the mirror and thinks that he is representative of the mass consumer market".
The exciting new technology doesn't come from Microsoft anymore, and hasn't in years...
I would say the opposite - in the 80s and 90s, there was nothing exciting coming from Microsoft, and they were years behind innovators such as Commodore. But since then, rightly or wrongly, they've died away and Microsoft have become dominant - yet thankfully, in the 2000s they've got their act together and shipped decent products. Windows has been decent since 2000; I've moved from Borland C++ to Visual Studio (Visual Studio 6 was crappy, but since 2005 has been a great product), and recently I finally started DirectX programming instead of OpenGL.
Sure, there are niche alternatives to Microsoft still around, and good luck to those who use them, but nothing to persuade me away from Windows now. The only notable exception I think where Microsoft lag behind is in web browers, where innovation comes from companies like Opera, and the features only end up in IE a few years later.
All the while people are paying for those XP licences, I don't see why Microsoft would care - indeed, that's actually a brilliant position to be in, something that most software companies would envy: to have people continually buying your old product, without you having to constantly struggle to add new features or otherwise encourage new sales.
I guess the reason why Microsoft continue to innovate is because even though XP may be a cash cow for them, they realise that it will not always be so.
Say I play a businesswoman on the telephone. Now say my little brother gets ahold of my phone while I'm in the bathroom and decides that I'm going to prostitute myself and gets into a binding contract. Did my phone make the contract or my little brother THROUGH the phone?
The answer ought to be obvious - if someone impersonated you in order to make a contract, then the contract isn't valid. If someone else made the contract themselves, then they are the ones bound by that - and if he's too young, it's not valid. The phone doesn't come into it. I don't know what happened when phones started becoming popular, but I would find it bizarre if the phone companies started having these sorts of discussions, and I find it odd that we have them now with the Internet.
When you press "I accept" or something similar on an econtract, you accepted... EULAS and TOS stand regardless of the electronic format.
No. The flaw here is assuming that an arbitrary action satisfies the "offer, acceptance and meeting of the minds". If say a person goes out of their way to order something on a website, when they have no reason to otherwise do so, then that is clearly met. But with EULs, the person has no choice - they have to click the okay button in order to use the software they have paid for and are legally entitled to use (this could also come under "absence of defects"). For example, I can't claim "If you reply to this post, you agree to pay me a million dollars" - even if you did that, it would be unreasonable to conclude that this indicated acceptance.
There is also the meeting of minds issue - you might reply and say "No I don't accept that", clearly indicating that. A user installing software might also say "I don't accept this, I'm just doing this to run my software", but there is no opportunity to write that in.
The rest of your post seems fine, but don't make the mistake of thinking any arbitrary action decided by only one party, as is commonly the case in EULs, satisfies the requirements you list.
The only plausible case in which an EUL would effectively be valid would be if installing software you've already bought would normally constitute copyright infringement. In that case, it becomes much like the GPL - whilst you could claim you didn't agree to it, you'd then be guilty of copyright infringement. Unfortunately many countries still have batshit copyright laws that don't allow for a software copying itself to RAM in order to use it. But the point is it's still true that clicking on an EUL doesn't constitute a contract - it's a licence, and you could still insist that you didn't agree to it if you prefer (and then get done for copyright infringment). The effective validity of the EUL here comes only because in practice most people would rather be sued for violating a contract they agreed to, than being guilty of copyright infringement.
(IANAL, but if a court ever decides all EULs are intrinsically valid, then anyone who replies can pay me one million dollars:)
Many (most?) state's laws regarding prostitution require actual physical contact (or the promise of same), so, since a digital being can't perform physical contact, an agreement to "I'll let you enter commands on Second life that will show animations where your avatar appears to be fucking mine and use poseballs to enhance the animation for 30 minutes for 1000 Linden" actually *might be* valid. (assuming all the other requirements for a contract are met)
Indeed. The obvious comparison would be paying for phone sex. If that's legal, I don't see that this is any different.
Unfortunately we have legislators who have been lured in by this language of "virtual crimes", and think that anything depicted on the Internet is equivalent to actually doing it for real. We've seen the uproar over "virtual rape" and "virtual child porn", how soon before we get people charged with "virtual murder" in WoW?
Indeed, I don't see why this is anything new, surely this is a matter of copyright law.
I find it curious the trend to refer to this as "virtual" property all of a sudden, rather than intellectual property. I'm trying to decide if it's a better term (if we refer to the MPAA's "property" as virtual, will it convey the idea that it shouldn't be treated the same as real property?), or does it still give the impression that it should be treated the same (in the same way as this batshit trend of referring to "virtual crimes" such as "virtual rape" or "virtual child porn" in order to criminalise things where no one has been harmed and are nothing like the real thing...)?
I probably couldn't code a particularly efficient quicksort, for example, off the top of my head - but I certainly understand how it works.
But that's just it - according to him, you should be kicked out the industry. He stated:
AuMatar: While you shouldn't have to code one from scratch anymore, any programmer who can't do a list, hash table, bubble sort, or btree at the drop of a hat ought to be kicked out of the industry.
You can't code it at the drop of a hat, according to him, get out the industry.
Don't be mislead by AuMatar retreating to a position of "But understanding these concepts is important". That's not the argument he presented, and indeed, that is the argument put forward by those who disagree with him. E.g., Unoriginal_Nickname stated:
I'll agree with you for most of what you said, but I disagree that programmers should learn to implement sorting algorithms.
You are in agreement with Unoriginal_Nickname, and others such as myself who say that understanding them is important, just that you shouldn't necessarily need to hand code one in exam room conditions at the drop of a hat. It is AuMatar who is doing the equivalent of claiming mathematicians should learn pi to 8 decimal places (actually I can do 15, but I'm not going to get smug and call for AuMatar to be kicked out the industry if he can't).
I'm a mathematician who works as a programmer. My apologies for not fitting into your simplistic argument.
(My job requires plenty of mathematical knowledge, and a maths background was more appropriate for my job than computer science, despite being a programmer.)
Perhaps we should take it further - surely by your reasoning, only a Bubble Sortist needs to know how to hand code a Bubble Sort under exam conditions, but other kind of programmers don't? After all, it's surely not possible that different fields may cross over, and that different people have different experiences.
What I would value far more is not someone who can regurtitate his college days where he memorised line by line an algorithm that you shouldn't be using anyway, rather, someone who can hand code any given algorithm as and when he needs to, when he hasn't previously memorised it - that could be a bubble sort if he hasn't previously learnt it, but it's even better to test that with other things.
Furthermore, for standard algorithms I would value someone who reads up about the algorithm, and preferably uses a standard version, to ensure optimised usage, no bugs, and to know about it's flaws (as is obviously the case with bubble sort), or whether they should be using it at all. Far better than that then someone who only shows off his skills by hacking together a quick version from memory without doing any checks.
Why, why, why do people get SO offended when you tell them they have to learn computers to be good at computers?
Straw man - no one has done this.
The issue is someone claiming an arbitrary list of things that all programmers must do, else be kicked out the industry. And then you come in, misleadingly equating that as the be all and end all of programming.
I see a lot of programmers who are bad at maths - which is equally as fundamental to computing. And yes, we should all strive to be better, but that's not an excuse to get smug about it, and call for people to be kicked out the industry. In particular, it disallows people to continue to learn in fields outside of their degree. If a fresh-out-of-university computer science graduate was starting a new job, it would be rather unfair for me to criticise him for being unable to do something under exam conditions that I could do, when it was part of my degree, and not others. As long as he's prepared to learn, that's what's important - and I should realise that there are probably things that he knows, that I don't yet know. It's commonplace for people to continue to learn outside of university.
Unless AuMatar was expert in all fields of computing fresh out of university, he is in no position to call for others to be sacked.
Not all programmers come from a computer science background. As someone with a maths degree, maybe I should get on my high horse and claim anyone who can't quickly prove a particular theorem I cite, without looking it up should be kicked out the industry - after all, maths is a fundamental part of computing too, and in many specialised jobs (as opposed to just being a generic code monkey) it may be even more relevant.
I do know what the aforementioned structures and algorithms are, FWIW - but I agree with the other poster in that knowing how and when to use these things is more important than being able to hand code them from scratch in exam-style conditions.
And why on earth are you encouraging something as bad as a bubble sort in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
Heads could roll, etc.
*pictures the scene* Angry parents turn up to the school, to be greeted by the headmaster rolling around on the floor.
Amiga was cool but I've had enough GURU MEDITATION ERRORS for one lifetime. The system was just not stable.
Few systems of the time were stable - the Amiga lacked memory protection, so any buggy program could take down the OS, just like many other OSs of the time such as MacOS and DOS. So unless you were running Linux or NT on your 386, this isn't a relevant factor.
"Guru Meditation" was just an early example of how seeing the effect of a crash would give a popular system a bad name even if it wasn't any less stable. People get annoyed at the crash, yet they don't ever have experience of how stable less popular systems are. Just like happened with Windows and the BSOD years later, even now with the NT line that is just as stable as Linux or OS X (indeed, I predicted that this would happen when I saw Windows replacing Amiga in home computing - the token Windows fan poked fun claiming the Amiga was unstable, but I knew the same would happen to Windows as more people used it at home).
For centuries, economists have been arguing that a growing population is essential to a strong economy and culture. ... We seriously, urgently need an economy that is not based on growth. For a while, we need one that is based on a shrinking population, and then we need to transition towards one that is based on a roughly constant population. Economists don't like this, but it's a fact of life.
I'm not sure this is true - surely many Western countries have little population growth, or in some cases near zero?
If anything, sudden population growth can be a problem, as decades later you'll have a surge of people who are retired, and the economy can't support them.
I was making was that a sizable portion of the windows using public does not like Vista
citation needed.
Sizable portion of Slashdot maybe. (And I say this as someone who still uses XP and 2000 - but I don't fool myself into thinking that consumers in general are staying away from Vista.)
I'm curious - got a reference?
Presumably if they are basing this off website access, there's no reason they can't list phones alongside PCs.
However it's rather odd, given that many people don't use phones for Internet access (or if they do, only occasionally). And even if the usage was an accurate measure of people who had that phone, listing them in a section of desktop operating systems doesn't really tell us anything useful - I'd much rather see the market share of the Iphone compared with, you know, other phones.
It wouldn't surprise me if Iphone users were more likely to use the Internet than most phone users, simply because if you pay a load of money for a high end phone, you might as well make full use of it. Another point is that I'm not sure how well most phones would identify themselves - especially those that don't run an OS with a brandname. Then there's people like me - I browse on my phone, but all my access will show up as whatever Opera's servers use, because I use Opera Mini.
I don't think listing it as a derivative of Mac OS X would help - firstly it's unclear to me whether the OS really is a derivative, secondly it's misleading to prop up the numbers of a desktop platform with people using a completely separate kind of product.
I'm not sure what's more damning to be honest - that Linux is outdone by a random niche phone, or that it's outdone by even Windows 2000 still. But hey, I know how it feels - I use Opera, which according to them is outdone already by Chrome, and still outdone by Netscape :(
Oddly, they do the same thing with every other product they talk about... your PC (no, I have a mac thanks); your volvo estate (no, I have a skoda thanks); your wall plug (no, I rent my flat, and own no wall plugs at all).
They do it on adverts, sure. I'd rather that Slashdot didn't turn into Slashvertisements - but sadly that does seem the way it's going with the endless Iphone stories...
Why does writing apps for the Iphone save me money? And if you say "or for your "common central points of download".", then there's nothing special about the Iphone is there.
if you still dont get it why dont you get to apple's site, hit the iphone tab, and look through their app store. then you'll see what I'm talking about.
Yes, yet another app store, just like other phones/networks have.
No, I don't get it. Because I have no idea what you're on about.
If someone has realized they can save people in your position a lot of time and money with a mobile phone app, then they might just go with the hottest mobile app distribution method on the planet, which ain't exactly java applets from web sites. (hint: talking about the app store here).
Firstly I'm not sure how this relates to the OP (who said nothing about app stores or other means of distribution). But since you bring it up, plenty of phones have central points of download for applications (often operated by the network providers, for example). The difference is that you aren't forced to use them. And even if they also support native code, they don't shun common platform independent standards such as Java (honestly, any other platform that lacked basic things like Java would be ridiculed, yet for Apple, it's touted as an advantage).
(I'm not sure how the rest of your points relate to his post either, to be honest?)
The iPhone is proving itself to be more of a very slick handheld computer than a phone.
Welcome at last to the 21st Century.
The transition from phones to handheld computers that have the extra ability to be phones started years ago.
Ah yes - I couldn't help noticing that people were wanting to put a negative spin on this.
If this was say, Apple, it would be "Look how popular their product is, fans are rushing to download and they can't keep up with the demand!" No one would be picking at their inability to meet that demand.
An clear example would be the reporting of queues for the Iphone 3G - no one dared criticised them for not offering 3G sooner like other companies, or having better store distribution so people weren't having to queue. No, the only spin on it was that queues implied Apple were immensely popular.
I couldn't agree more. I think it's part of the marketing hype that Slashdot and others have fallen to where "On The IpHoNe" - or indeed, "On Your Iphone" makes it newsworthy.
"Ever wished your iPhone could do more than just play some cool games? How about using a chat client instead of SMS?"
"Ever wished your iPhone could do more than just play some cool games? How about using it to access a website, just like almost every other phone has been doing for years?"
"Ever wished your iPhone could do more than just play some cool games? How about using it to speak into the microphone, and use it as a communication device to talk as if by magic with someone not even in the same room?"
Similarly, it pisses me off that 90% of music docks are ipod-only
Whilst there's no excuse for the lack of standardisation that Apple have encouraged, in this case at least you can't blame the manufacturers as the Ipod is the most popular device. But the Iphone? Sorry, despite the impression one might get from reading Slashdot, it's just one of many phones with much larger companies that have sold billions - and plenty of those phones have for years been doing the "new" things that are advertised, er, reported for the Iphone. That "Ipod" has become synonymous with "mp3 player" is understandable, in the same way it occurred for "Walkman", but trying to do it for the Iphone? That's just annoying.
Voice changes.
I don't think quibbling over the details of my example changes the point. Okay, make it my little sister - clearly there are examples where deception is possible without using the Internet. Perhaps the Internet makes it easier, but the point is that it's nothing new.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "persona", but avatars are not living things, nor are they the person themselves. There's no fundamental difference between an avatar or the company logo on a letter, at least in the context of contract law, that we are discussing.
No one comes up to the car and says' Hello BMW. Wanna go on a raid with me and Ford and Chrystler?'.
No one says "Hello Avatar" either. They talk to the person. And if you're talking about games where people role-play someone else, firstly that existed before the Internet too, secondly I don't believe this tends to happen on Second Life, thirdly I don't see how it's connected to the idea of deception. If someone logged in as you and tried to make a contract between you and someone else, the fact that you normally use the account for pretending to be an Elf doesn't change the fact that the contract is clearly not valid.
OOI, do you view all companies as drug dealers for using capitalist means to get people interested in their products, or is it only Microsoft that are bad for doing this?
(And why only talk about drug dealers - do you hate it when bars have a happy hour too?)
Comparing to NN4 is a highly misleading analogy! The stereotype about "people who still run NN4" came about when NN4 was old, and only used by a small number of people, and when newer browsers such as IE 6 and later Opera were available. Suggesting that this is comparable to people who run Vista is ludicrous.
Back in the days when most people ran NN4, are you telling me that they shouldn't have? Were you huddled over your IE 3, telling yourself "It doesn't matter than everyone else runs NN4, it's not relevant"?
They're not really that relevant.
I am not sure what definition of "relevant" you are using. Ignoring NN4 when it was the mainstream browser would have been foolish. Suggesting that any recent version of Windows (yes even 2000, which has more users than Linux for example) is not relevant in the same way as NN4 is ludicrous.
I don't know very many people in this age who don't own a television, but it too is not particularly relevant anymore, and in the same fashion.
In what sense is television not relevant today? And wait - a television is owned by most people, whilst NN4 is used by hardly anyone, and both are not relevant "in the same fashion"? I'm very confused here...
Personally, I don't consider them to be particularly relevant anymore.
I think the comment up above summed it up perfectly: "The geek looks in the mirror and thinks that he is representative of the mass consumer market".
The exciting new technology doesn't come from Microsoft anymore, and hasn't in years...
I would say the opposite - in the 80s and 90s, there was nothing exciting coming from Microsoft, and they were years behind innovators such as Commodore. But since then, rightly or wrongly, they've died away and Microsoft have become dominant - yet thankfully, in the 2000s they've got their act together and shipped decent products. Windows has been decent since 2000; I've moved from Borland C++ to Visual Studio (Visual Studio 6 was crappy, but since 2005 has been a great product), and recently I finally started DirectX programming instead of OpenGL.
Sure, there are niche alternatives to Microsoft still around, and good luck to those who use them, but nothing to persuade me away from Windows now. The only notable exception I think where Microsoft lag behind is in web browers, where innovation comes from companies like Opera, and the features only end up in IE a few years later.
All the while people are paying for those XP licences, I don't see why Microsoft would care - indeed, that's actually a brilliant position to be in, something that most software companies would envy: to have people continually buying your old product, without you having to constantly struggle to add new features or otherwise encourage new sales.
I guess the reason why Microsoft continue to innovate is because even though XP may be a cash cow for them, they realise that it will not always be so.
Say I play a businesswoman on the telephone. Now say my little brother gets ahold of my phone while I'm in the bathroom and decides that I'm going to prostitute myself and gets into a binding contract. Did my phone make the contract or my little brother THROUGH the phone?
The answer ought to be obvious - if someone impersonated you in order to make a contract, then the contract isn't valid. If someone else made the contract themselves, then they are the ones bound by that - and if he's too young, it's not valid. The phone doesn't come into it. I don't know what happened when phones started becoming popular, but I would find it bizarre if the phone companies started having these sorts of discussions, and I find it odd that we have them now with the Internet.
When you press "I accept" or something similar on an econtract, you accepted ... EULAS and TOS stand regardless of the electronic format.
No. The flaw here is assuming that an arbitrary action satisfies the "offer, acceptance and meeting of the minds". If say a person goes out of their way to order something on a website, when they have no reason to otherwise do so, then that is clearly met. But with EULs, the person has no choice - they have to click the okay button in order to use the software they have paid for and are legally entitled to use (this could also come under "absence of defects"). For example, I can't claim "If you reply to this post, you agree to pay me a million dollars" - even if you did that, it would be unreasonable to conclude that this indicated acceptance.
There is also the meeting of minds issue - you might reply and say "No I don't accept that", clearly indicating that. A user installing software might also say "I don't accept this, I'm just doing this to run my software", but there is no opportunity to write that in.
The rest of your post seems fine, but don't make the mistake of thinking any arbitrary action decided by only one party, as is commonly the case in EULs, satisfies the requirements you list.
The only plausible case in which an EUL would effectively be valid would be if installing software you've already bought would normally constitute copyright infringement. In that case, it becomes much like the GPL - whilst you could claim you didn't agree to it, you'd then be guilty of copyright infringement. Unfortunately many countries still have batshit copyright laws that don't allow for a software copying itself to RAM in order to use it. But the point is it's still true that clicking on an EUL doesn't constitute a contract - it's a licence, and you could still insist that you didn't agree to it if you prefer (and then get done for copyright infringment). The effective validity of the EUL here comes only because in practice most people would rather be sued for violating a contract they agreed to, than being guilty of copyright infringement.
(IANAL, but if a court ever decides all EULs are intrinsically valid, then anyone who replies can pay me one million dollars:)
Many (most?) state's laws regarding prostitution require actual physical contact (or the promise of same), so, since a digital being can't perform physical contact, an agreement to "I'll let you enter commands on Second life that will show animations where your avatar appears to be fucking mine and use poseballs to enhance the animation for 30 minutes for 1000 Linden" actually *might be* valid. (assuming all the other requirements for a contract are met)
Indeed. The obvious comparison would be paying for phone sex. If that's legal, I don't see that this is any different.
Unfortunately we have legislators who have been lured in by this language of "virtual crimes", and think that anything depicted on the Internet is equivalent to actually doing it for real. We've seen the uproar over "virtual rape" and "virtual child porn", how soon before we get people charged with "virtual murder" in WoW?
Indeed, I don't see why this is anything new, surely this is a matter of copyright law.
I find it curious the trend to refer to this as "virtual" property all of a sudden, rather than intellectual property. I'm trying to decide if it's a better term (if we refer to the MPAA's "property" as virtual, will it convey the idea that it shouldn't be treated the same as real property?), or does it still give the impression that it should be treated the same (in the same way as this batshit trend of referring to "virtual crimes" such as "virtual rape" or "virtual child porn" in order to criminalise things where no one has been harmed and are nothing like the real thing...)?
I probably couldn't code a particularly efficient quicksort, for example, off the top of my head - but I certainly understand how it works.
But that's just it - according to him, you should be kicked out the industry. He stated:
AuMatar: While you shouldn't have to code one from scratch anymore, any programmer who can't do a list, hash table, bubble sort, or btree at the drop of a hat ought to be kicked out of the industry.
You can't code it at the drop of a hat, according to him, get out the industry.
Don't be mislead by AuMatar retreating to a position of "But understanding these concepts is important". That's not the argument he presented, and indeed, that is the argument put forward by those who disagree with him. E.g., Unoriginal_Nickname stated:
I'll agree with you for most of what you said, but I disagree that programmers should learn to implement sorting algorithms.
You are in agreement with Unoriginal_Nickname, and others such as myself who say that understanding them is important, just that you shouldn't necessarily need to hand code one in exam room conditions at the drop of a hat. It is AuMatar who is doing the equivalent of claiming mathematicians should learn pi to 8 decimal places (actually I can do 15, but I'm not going to get smug and call for AuMatar to be kicked out the industry if he can't).
I'm a mathematician who works as a programmer. My apologies for not fitting into your simplistic argument.
(My job requires plenty of mathematical knowledge, and a maths background was more appropriate for my job than computer science, despite being a programmer.)
Perhaps we should take it further - surely by your reasoning, only a Bubble Sortist needs to know how to hand code a Bubble Sort under exam conditions, but other kind of programmers don't? After all, it's surely not possible that different fields may cross over, and that different people have different experiences.
What I would value far more is not someone who can regurtitate his college days where he memorised line by line an algorithm that you shouldn't be using anyway, rather, someone who can hand code any given algorithm as and when he needs to, when he hasn't previously memorised it - that could be a bubble sort if he hasn't previously learnt it, but it's even better to test that with other things.
Furthermore, for standard algorithms I would value someone who reads up about the algorithm, and preferably uses a standard version, to ensure optimised usage, no bugs, and to know about it's flaws (as is obviously the case with bubble sort), or whether they should be using it at all. Far better than that then someone who only shows off his skills by hacking together a quick version from memory without doing any checks.
Why, why, why do people get SO offended when you tell them they have to learn computers to be good at computers?
Straw man - no one has done this.
The issue is someone claiming an arbitrary list of things that all programmers must do, else be kicked out the industry. And then you come in, misleadingly equating that as the be all and end all of programming.
I see a lot of programmers who are bad at maths - which is equally as fundamental to computing. And yes, we should all strive to be better, but that's not an excuse to get smug about it, and call for people to be kicked out the industry. In particular, it disallows people to continue to learn in fields outside of their degree. If a fresh-out-of-university computer science graduate was starting a new job, it would be rather unfair for me to criticise him for being unable to do something under exam conditions that I could do, when it was part of my degree, and not others. As long as he's prepared to learn, that's what's important - and I should realise that there are probably things that he knows, that I don't yet know. It's commonplace for people to continue to learn outside of university.
Unless AuMatar was expert in all fields of computing fresh out of university, he is in no position to call for others to be sacked.
Not all programmers come from a computer science background. As someone with a maths degree, maybe I should get on my high horse and claim anyone who can't quickly prove a particular theorem I cite, without looking it up should be kicked out the industry - after all, maths is a fundamental part of computing too, and in many specialised jobs (as opposed to just being a generic code monkey) it may be even more relevant.
I do know what the aforementioned structures and algorithms are, FWIW - but I agree with the other poster in that knowing how and when to use these things is more important than being able to hand code them from scratch in exam-style conditions.
And why on earth are you encouraging something as bad as a bubble sort in the first place?