the ipod has been out for a while now and given its fairly long use-life just about everybody who was willing to get one at $300 has probably done so already.
...the only way they can get some repeat business on the thing.
I had myself a PB 486 SX-25. It was so pimp, I had to remove the hard drive so I could get the floppy drive out to replace that beautiful 5.25 with a CD-ROM. And nothing beat that 2400 modem. Yum.
This is the biggest computer-related time event since Y2K, which begun on January 1, 19100!
In standard/. fashion, I will overlook factual inaccuracies in the interest of pursuing my goal of correcting everyone's grammar. As such, I must tell you that Y2K *began* on January 1, 19100.
I've shied away from earlier OO releases but have been very satisfied with the 1.1 release. I've been offering Open Office.org 1.1 to my clients as a cost effective alternative to MS Office and have gotten very positive feedback so far.
I still have some conversion issues (the WP doesn't like MS's superscripts or subscripts much and embedded graphics generally don't work on conversion from MS). Also, I think the graphing/charting in the spreadsheet is ugly as can be, and they could do with separating the poducts out to make the whole thing lighter. But it's getting there. It's more stable (though that's not to say very stable), and I really like its equation editor.
That said, it's still not for situations where people need to be able to open complex, microsoft-formatted documents, particularly those with graphics and formulae embedded.
However, I'm sure it's fine for the city of Austin, as bureaucrats could get by with typewriters, I expect.
Actually, Sony's divisions have a history of doing their own thing and not playing well together. It is not uncommon for one division to be doing something the other division doesn't like.
Absolutely true (didn't want to get into that in original post). I've a feeling, though, from what I've been hearing, that the Columbia division has been bending the ear of management lately (can't remember the link). All in all, I'd say it's more likely that an electronics company without the attached media conglomerate will lead on most of the technologies that "threaten" media, though we shall see.
Last time I checked, sales were more dependant on the consumer than the peddler. I'd hope it's more important to convince consumers their right to use what they are investing in isn't in jeopardy.
...if all media that MOST people want to listen to is DRM-only. Of course, since a DRM-free market will sell more shit than a DRM-crippled media market, manufacturers WANT you to have as much freedom as possible, as it's good for their profits.
The only problem with that is that some of the major hardware manufacterers are owned by companies that reside in the same corporate parent as a large media company (example: Sony and Columbia). So don't expect Sony to lead the anti-DRM charge.
How (exactly) can someone be expected to adhere to a contract if they do not even know the contract exists?!?!?!
You get the contract with the delivery of the product. All products I've seen that have EULAs disclose the existence of such on the outside. That's sufficient to get around any complaint you have, according to the court:
"Notice on the outside, terms on the inside, and a right to return the software for a refund if the terms are unacceptable (a right that the license expressly extends), may be a means of doing business valuable to buyers and sellers alike.
If you're arguing that a EULA whose existence is never alluded to is illegal, you may have ground there. However, all the box has to say is "See end-user license agreement inside" and it's legal and binding. I've never seen one that didn't say that at a minimum. The box does not have to have all the terms on it, though it may be required to allude to their existence. Even then the court's decision wasn't clear:
Or consider the purchase of an airline ticket. The traveler calls the carrier or an agent, is quoted a price, reserves a seat, pays, and gets a ticket, in that order. The ticket contains elaborate terms, which the traveler can reject by canceling the reservation. To use the ticket is to ac- cept the terms, even terms that in retrospect are dis- advantageous.
Here, the court allows for a contract with tacked-on terms, given a situation in which the pre-sale disclosure of additional terms IS NOT performed. So the court CLEARLY leaves open the possibility that a EULA whose existence was NOT known to the buyer IS binding.
Again, if you have a problem with the court, take it up with them, not me.
That is because these companies are in USA. Other countries have laws and regulations as to what you can say in a commercial. And 'fine print' at the bottom of the screen that lasts for 0.01 seconds is not allowed either.
I figured. Shouldn't be here either, oh well.
Quite frankly, I find most of the US advertising to be disgusting and very dishonest. Look at car commercials with 0% APR, and 0% APR is only available to a few select, but the commercial says nothing about this. Most advertising is faulty and full of lies that the advertiser can not follow up on.
That's interesting, Dateline did an expose on this two weeks ago in which they showed that basically no one gets 0%. Possibly no one at all. And when they do finance you, they screw you horribly, with rates roughly double what the same people could get elsewhere.
Yes, but you're missing the point that the customer must be made aware of the contract before they buy it.
No. They don't. They simply have to have the right to refuse the transaction if the additional terms of the contract added by the EULA are untenable to the consumer.
Saying "oh, you can return it once you open it and decide you don't like the EULA" is meaningless if the person wasn't made aware at the time of sale that there were additional terms he or she must agree to before being able to use the software.
Funny, an appellate court disagrees with you. I linked to the ProCD decision in one of my other responses in this thread, look it up. The court specifically cites revocability of the contract as one of the things that makes EULAs legal. They also cite the impossibility of displaying the entire contract at point-of-sale as another factor.
I bought it, it's mine, I don't agree to the EULA, I can still use it.
No. You can't. And if you do something that countered the EULA, you may be legally responsible if the court upholds the EULA, which they likely will if it's well-crafted.
Just because you don't want it to be true doesn't mean it's not. Check actual legal precedent here, because your own interpretation of the law is NOT upheld by specific, relevant court decisions.
There have been instances in which EULAs didn't hold up, but these cases were specific to those EULAs, not to the breed.
The Supreme Court has ruled the exact opposite - that EULA's are invalid because they comprise of an attempt to add additional terms and conditions after a sale.
The supreme court of the US has not ruled on EULA's specifially to my knowledge, I'd love to see evidence to the contrary.
Here's a decision where a particular EULA was upheld, and also ruled that EULAs can, in general, be legal (generally) so long as the buyer has recourse to refuse the additional terms.
Again, EULA's can be legal, though it doesn't mean that every EULA is legal.
I think you're missing the point. Since when did ISP's become the internet police?
Nope, I pretty well got it. They became the police when they gave you access. If they want to do the general world a favor by not spewing virii, great. Not to mention it drops their traffic.
Half the guys working the tech desk at Access don't have any certification.
Doesn't take brain surgery to shut off someone's access when your software says they're spewing virii.
And these untrained monkeys are telling me how to fix a computer?
No, they're telling you *to* fix the computer, and offering you suggestions in case you're incompetent. How you fix the computer is up to you, as long as you do.
Not correctly installing/administrating a computer? These are my in-laws. They've had a computer for about two and a half years! You think they know how to administrate it?
I don't really care. If they can't, get an OS that's solid. Incompetence doesn't release them from their obligation not to spew virii and crap. That's like saying running over pedestrians isn't their fault since they don't know how to drive. If that's the case, they lose their license. Same here. If they can't even set up antivirus, then they can stay offline until they figure that out, or beg someone else (ie, you) to do it for them. Not my problem.
What's wrong with you. You're at college... damn straight you should be punished for not adminstrating, it should be on your goddamned final exam!
I'm not a CS undergrad, I'm getting a Ph.D. in chemistry. But nice crack anyway.;)
This isn't necessarily a bad thing but when I go over to fix it I have to download all the removal tools at home and burn them onto a CD because if I call them asking them to turn it on to grab a removal tool they tell me that they will not turn it back on until the system is clean and suggest a format!!
Good for them. I wish more ISP's would scan for virus activity and shut down the perpetrators. The college I'm at shuts you down if you do.
And yes, you have to go to another computer and download removal tools. Have you noticed that Symantec generally keeps their removal tools under 1.44 MB? Convenient, eh? Or yes, you can burn them.
It's happened to me when I didn't lock down a windows box fast enough after an install. And I deserved it. That's the price of not correctly installing/administring your box.
One of the mobile phone providers advertises "UNLIMITED" minutes in one high-end package. In the submicrometer-sized print at the bottom of the ad it states that usage above 3000 minutes "is subject to review".
Why are advertisers allowed to say one thing in a commercial loud and clear, but then contradict it completely with fine print? Why is this OK? There's the example you give. There are the weight-loss pills that say "You'll lose weight!" but claim "Your results may vary" at the bottom. There are the male enhancement pills that claim "Increased size" but then say "These statements not evaluated by the FDA" at the bottom. In other words, we're talking out of our asses here.
So I'm allowed to flat-out lie in big bold letters or audio on a commercial so long as I tell the truth somewhere else? Can I say "Free car with purchase of a value meal" and then say "Car actually costs $20,000" at the bottom?
Get a T1 and try being an ISP yourself. You'll understand why they can't make any money if everybody is pulling a full T1 worth of bandwidth for a fraction of a T1 price very quickly.
That's fine, I realize there are market realities to being an ISP, but don't advertise it as unlimited if it's not. In other words, don't advertise a service you aren't willing to actually provide. Novel concept, I realize.
If the EULA is not on the outside of the box, than it is invalid if you bought the box from a store.
That's not true. Courts have ruled, routinely, that the full version of a long contract that cannot be displayed at time of purchase may be included along with delivery. Generally, if this requires the consumer to waive rights, then the consumer is entitled to a refund if s/he does not agree with the new terms in the EULA.
However, EULAs in general are NOT illegal, for the simple matter that they wouldn't FIT on the outside of the box.
I became a GNOME user because KDE was so fugly in the past. I might consider trying it out now that there is a decent installed theme. I could never figure out how a DE with so many European users could be so styleless.
Most of the security problems I've seen come from moron users running questionable applications. If the e-mail blast from ass-munch marketing had a mac version of their software, spyware and trojans would be just as prevalent on the Mac OS as it is in Windows; but when 90%+ of the machines on the other end are all going to be Windows, you don't write another version.
Although for a good linux/mac system, none of that junk would execute with priveleges, meaning that the most it could do would be to spew stuff without damaging anything locally. I'm also not sure what Mac's better firewall system and such would prevent from running.
I tell ya, tho, I know what you're saying. The bane of my existence on the few machines I take care of at work is the morons who install that frigging adware crap.
"security through obscurity" - what Lance is referring to toward the end of his article - doesn't work.
I realize this is an oft-repeated truism, and obscurity alone doesn't make a system truly secure...but it certainly helps. To make an analogy, I know of many friends who have been robbed, even when their valuables were well-locked. However, those who put their valuables in places theives never think to look are generally the ones who keep them - good security is never perfect, and is generally at best a deterrent, at worst a challenge. Hell, security through obscurity is the whole basis for steganography, though most would recommend encryption as part of a "why not?" sort of preprocessing step.
As such, I think it's a given that Windows is at least less secure because of its market share. Whether Mac is more secure because of its obecurity is debatable - I'm sure there are a number of generic unix exploits that macs would suffer from, and the general unix community is very high profile.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuff said.
...the guy also said oxygen was a poison. And I bet he signed the petition to ban the even less safe di-hidroxide form of oxygen.
...when I have you to do it for me?
You macheads are the easiest trollbait on the face of the earth. It's just a computer, freaks.
By the way, not everyone has had success replacing the battery with after-market replacements.
...the only way they can get some repeat business on the thing.
I had myself a PB 486 SX-25. It was so pimp, I had to remove the hard drive so I could get the floppy drive out to replace that beautiful 5.25 with a CD-ROM. And nothing beat that 2400 modem. Yum.
In standard /. fashion, I will overlook factual inaccuracies in the interest of pursuing my goal of correcting everyone's grammar. As such, I must tell you that Y2K *began* on January 1, 19100.
It's not even /.'ed for Chrissakes. And post fulltexts AC.
I still have some conversion issues (the WP doesn't like MS's superscripts or subscripts much and embedded graphics generally don't work on conversion from MS). Also, I think the graphing/charting in the spreadsheet is ugly as can be, and they could do with separating the poducts out to make the whole thing lighter. But it's getting there. It's more stable (though that's not to say very stable), and I really like its equation editor.
That said, it's still not for situations where people need to be able to open complex, microsoft-formatted documents, particularly those with graphics and formulae embedded.
However, I'm sure it's fine for the city of Austin, as bureaucrats could get by with typewriters, I expect.
Absolutely true (didn't want to get into that in original post). I've a feeling, though, from what I've been hearing, that the Columbia division has been bending the ear of management lately (can't remember the link). All in all, I'd say it's more likely that an electronics company without the attached media conglomerate will lead on most of the technologies that "threaten" media, though we shall see.
Surreal? Slashdot? You're just talking about this, right?
...if all media that MOST people want to listen to is DRM-only. Of course, since a DRM-free market will sell more shit than a DRM-crippled media market, manufacturers WANT you to have as much freedom as possible, as it's good for their profits.
The only problem with that is that some of the major hardware manufacterers are owned by companies that reside in the same corporate parent as a large media company (example: Sony and Columbia). So don't expect Sony to lead the anti-DRM charge.
How (exactly) can someone be expected to adhere to a contract if they do not even know the contract exists?!?!?!
You get the contract with the delivery of the product. All products I've seen that have EULAs disclose the existence of such on the outside. That's sufficient to get around any complaint you have, according to the court:
If you're arguing that a EULA whose existence is never alluded to is illegal, you may have ground there. However, all the box has to say is "See end-user license agreement inside" and it's legal and binding. I've never seen one that didn't say that at a minimum. The box does not have to have all the terms on it, though it may be required to allude to their existence. Even then the court's decision wasn't clear:
Here, the court allows for a contract with tacked-on terms, given a situation in which the pre-sale disclosure of additional terms IS NOT performed. So the court CLEARLY leaves open the possibility that a EULA whose existence was NOT known to the buyer IS binding.
Again, if you have a problem with the court, take it up with them, not me.
I figured. Shouldn't be here either, oh well.
Quite frankly, I find most of the US advertising to be disgusting and very dishonest. Look at car commercials with 0% APR, and 0% APR is only available to a few select, but the commercial says nothing about this. Most advertising is faulty and full of lies that the advertiser can not follow up on.
That's interesting, Dateline did an expose on this two weeks ago in which they showed that basically no one gets 0%. Possibly no one at all. And when they do finance you, they screw you horribly, with rates roughly double what the same people could get elsewhere.
No. They don't. They simply have to have the right to refuse the transaction if the additional terms of the contract added by the EULA are untenable to the consumer.
Saying "oh, you can return it once you open it and decide you don't like the EULA" is meaningless if the person wasn't made aware at the time of sale that there were additional terms he or she must agree to before being able to use the software.
Funny, an appellate court disagrees with you. I linked to the ProCD decision in one of my other responses in this thread, look it up. The court specifically cites revocability of the contract as one of the things that makes EULAs legal. They also cite the impossibility of displaying the entire contract at point-of-sale as another factor.
I bought it, it's mine, I don't agree to the EULA, I can still use it.
No. You can't. And if you do something that countered the EULA, you may be legally responsible if the court upholds the EULA, which they likely will if it's well-crafted.
Just because you don't want it to be true doesn't mean it's not. Check actual legal precedent here, because your own interpretation of the law is NOT upheld by specific, relevant court decisions.
There have been instances in which EULAs didn't hold up, but these cases were specific to those EULAs, not to the breed.
The supreme court of the US has not ruled on EULA's specifially to my knowledge, I'd love to see evidence to the contrary.
Here's a decision where a particular EULA was upheld, and also ruled that EULAs can, in general, be legal (generally) so long as the buyer has recourse to refuse the additional terms.
Again, EULA's can be legal, though it doesn't mean that every EULA is legal.
Nope, I pretty well got it. They became the police when they gave you access. If they want to do the general world a favor by not spewing virii, great. Not to mention it drops their traffic.
Half the guys working the tech desk at Access don't have any certification.
Doesn't take brain surgery to shut off someone's access when your software says they're spewing virii.
And these untrained monkeys are telling me how to fix a computer?
No, they're telling you *to* fix the computer, and offering you suggestions in case you're incompetent. How you fix the computer is up to you, as long as you do.
Not correctly installing/administrating a computer? These are my in-laws. They've had a computer for about two and a half years! You think they know how to administrate it?
I don't really care. If they can't, get an OS that's solid. Incompetence doesn't release them from their obligation not to spew virii and crap. That's like saying running over pedestrians isn't their fault since they don't know how to drive. If that's the case, they lose their license. Same here. If they can't even set up antivirus, then they can stay offline until they figure that out, or beg someone else (ie, you) to do it for them. Not my problem.
What's wrong with you. You're at college ... damn straight you should be punished for not adminstrating, it should be on your goddamned final exam!
I'm not a CS undergrad, I'm getting a Ph.D. in chemistry. But nice crack anyway. ;)
Good for them. I wish more ISP's would scan for virus activity and shut down the perpetrators. The college I'm at shuts you down if you do.
And yes, you have to go to another computer and download removal tools. Have you noticed that Symantec generally keeps their removal tools under 1.44 MB? Convenient, eh? Or yes, you can burn them.
It's happened to me when I didn't lock down a windows box fast enough after an install. And I deserved it. That's the price of not correctly installing/administring your box.
Why are advertisers allowed to say one thing in a commercial loud and clear, but then contradict it completely with fine print? Why is this OK? There's the example you give. There are the weight-loss pills that say "You'll lose weight!" but claim "Your results may vary" at the bottom. There are the male enhancement pills that claim "Increased size" but then say "These statements not evaluated by the FDA" at the bottom. In other words, we're talking out of our asses here.
So I'm allowed to flat-out lie in big bold letters or audio on a commercial so long as I tell the truth somewhere else? Can I say "Free car with purchase of a value meal" and then say "Car actually costs $20,000" at the bottom?
What's the limit with this crap?
That's fine, I realize there are market realities to being an ISP, but don't advertise it as unlimited if it's not. In other words, don't advertise a service you aren't willing to actually provide. Novel concept, I realize.
That's not true. Courts have ruled, routinely, that the full version of a long contract that cannot be displayed at time of purchase may be included along with delivery. Generally, if this requires the consumer to waive rights, then the consumer is entitled to a refund if s/he does not agree with the new terms in the EULA.
However, EULAs in general are NOT illegal, for the simple matter that they wouldn't FIT on the outside of the box.
I think you just answered your own question.
Although for a good linux/mac system, none of that junk would execute with priveleges, meaning that the most it could do would be to spew stuff without damaging anything locally. I'm also not sure what Mac's better firewall system and such would prevent from running.
I tell ya, tho, I know what you're saying. The bane of my existence on the few machines I take care of at work is the morons who install that frigging adware crap.
...Agent Denton.
I realize this is an oft-repeated truism, and obscurity alone doesn't make a system truly secure...but it certainly helps. To make an analogy, I know of many friends who have been robbed, even when their valuables were well-locked. However, those who put their valuables in places theives never think to look are generally the ones who keep them - good security is never perfect, and is generally at best a deterrent, at worst a challenge. Hell, security through obscurity is the whole basis for steganography, though most would recommend encryption as part of a "why not?" sort of preprocessing step.
As such, I think it's a given that Windows is at least less secure because of its market share. Whether Mac is more secure because of its obecurity is debatable - I'm sure there are a number of generic unix exploits that macs would suffer from, and the general unix community is very high profile.
How about when I...I mean my friend, dropped roofies on the bitch and she still wouldn't put out?