"Oh. There's a router down, huh?" "I'm sorry to hear that. I'm looking forward to the paper work for the backup gear being completed" -- "Okay, well, I'm in the middle of a cemetary that's about 5 miles outside of town at the moment." -- "Well, I'm on foot, so it'll be more like an hour." -- --... -- "Yeah. You might want to call Mike, in the mean time." -- -- "I'll give him a call when I get in range of a computer to make sure he's all right." --..... . -- "Righto. Good luck with that. (prick)"
Yeah. Okay. Right.
So what do you think banks do? The funds you have "stored" in said institutions are certainly not put on the shelf to gather dust awaiting your return. There are many valid arguments for not sinking your saved/loaned funds into some kind of investment account, but this is certainly not one of them. Banks may have been given legal citizenship status, but they are not your neighbors. Make wise decisions with your funds, but by no means make it an issue of morality/right-n-wrong.
If you make a mint, good work. If not, they'll come in the night and remove your sellable body parts and leave you with plastic replacements...
I am indeed crushed. Flattened like the week old corpse of a smallish beetle under the heel of a fat man. I am bug dust blown before what is undoubtedly a certifiably freakish halitosis...
I go now to my death!
And how high does the days-since-your-evaluation-license-expired counter on your winzip installation count...:P
Perhaps a little research under the topic of "common carrier" as it pertains to the telecommunications industry might give you a couple ideas as to the untenable nature of this sort of EULA clause.
Not everything you read is true. Not everything you sign is binding.
When I was in college, I watched in utter amazement at the number of students that rushed home to change after a campus LBG group posted signs to the affect of "support LBG students! wear jeans on Monday!" (these were, of course, posted late Sunday night)
An excellent time to quote President Zaphod Beeblebrox: "WOW!"
It makes me quiver with abject glee to know with relative certainty that authors of printed publications will never resort to individual licenses (rather than the kind of license that is required to, for instance, make a movie or adapt the story to the stage) that would abjectly forbid any other author or potential author of a book in a similar genre from reading!
Imagine if H.G. Wells would have declared that anyone reading his books would be strictly forbidden from publishing a novel in the genre that would become known as science-fiction.
Imagine if chip manufacturer X were to forbid other chip manufacturers from using their(X) chips or any product that uses their chips in the design or fabrication of the competing chips.
Imagine if you were forbidden from using ketchup in your meatloaf!! AAAAHHHHH!!!!! Hrm... okay. I'm slipping. Heh. Yeah. Anyway.
Regardless of how simple and striaght-forward the BitKeeper product may be, I think Mr. McVoy is forgetting that folks that do kernel development have been using tools such as gcc, as, emacs, vi, lint, m4 thingies, troff, make, info... XWindows (for the love of God!) Needless to say, your average kernel developer is probably not the typical oh-my-i-just-cant-figure-this-out-when-is-bill-goi ng-to-come-and-save-me-with-another-bug-ridden-blo ated-version-of-his-operating-system-so-I-can-get- on-with-what-I-really-want-do sort of end user. If he really thinks he can bully the egg-head* community in such a fashion, he's either much more brilliant than he's coming off as or his visions of becoming a respected revision control system author are going to intersect quite abruptly with the particular variety of fate known as limited-lifespan (at least as it pertains to projects that have large groups of developers that just might actually work for a competitor).
On a different angle, if the kernel community does not decide to ditch BK for some reason, it will make for entertaining legal stories if/when Mr. McVoy starts having people hauled in. Can you imagine the kinds of goodies that will be drifting through the minds of those junior-assistant-undersecretary-to-the-person-who- brings-water-to-the-one-who-gets-to-deal-with-the- silly-things officer at foreign state departments?
Mr. McVoy, please. I beg of you. Our glorious leader is already making us look extremely silly and annoying to the rest of the planet! Please do not exaserbate the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
I adopted a golden retriever.
... -- "Yeah. You might want to call Mike, in the mean time." -- -- "I'll give him a call when I get in range of a computer to make sure he's all right." -- ... .. . -- "Righto. Good luck with that. (prick)"
"Oh. There's a router down, huh?" "I'm sorry to hear that. I'm looking forward to the paper work for the backup gear being completed" -- "Okay, well, I'm in the middle of a cemetary that's about 5 miles outside of town at the moment." -- "Well, I'm on foot, so it'll be more like an hour." -- --
Yeah. Okay. Right. So what do you think banks do? The funds you have "stored" in said institutions are certainly not put on the shelf to gather dust awaiting your return. There are many valid arguments for not sinking your saved/loaned funds into some kind of investment account, but this is certainly not one of them. Banks may have been given legal citizenship status, but they are not your neighbors. Make wise decisions with your funds, but by no means make it an issue of morality/right-n-wrong. If you make a mint, good work. If not, they'll come in the night and remove your sellable body parts and leave you with plastic replacements...
I am indeed crushed. Flattened like the week old corpse of a smallish beetle under the heel of a fat man. I am bug dust blown before what is undoubtedly a certifiably freakish halitosis... I go now to my death!
I'm crushed.
:P
And how high does the days-since-your-evaluation-license-expired counter on your winzip installation count...
Perhaps a little research under the topic of "common carrier" as it pertains to the telecommunications industry might give you a couple ideas as to the untenable nature of this sort of EULA clause.
Not everything you read is true. Not everything you sign is binding.
When I was in college, I watched in utter amazement at the number of students that rushed home to change after a campus LBG group posted signs to the affect of "support LBG students! wear jeans on Monday!" (these were, of course, posted late Sunday night)
An excellent time to quote President Zaphod Beeblebrox: "WOW!"
i ng-to-come-and-save-me-with-another-bug-ridden-blo ated-version-of-his-operating-system-so-I-can-get- on-with-what-I-really-want-do
- brings-water-to-the-one-who-gets-to-deal-with-the- silly-things officer at foreign state departments?
It makes me quiver with abject glee to know with relative certainty that authors of printed publications will never resort to individual licenses (rather than the kind of license that is required to, for instance, make a movie or adapt the story to the stage) that would abjectly forbid any other author or potential author of a book in a similar genre from reading!
Imagine if H.G. Wells would have declared that anyone reading his books would be strictly forbidden from publishing a novel in the genre that would become known as science-fiction.
Imagine if chip manufacturer X were to forbid other chip manufacturers from using their(X) chips or any product that uses their chips in the design or fabrication of the competing chips.
Imagine if you were forbidden from using ketchup in your meatloaf!! AAAAHHHHH!!!!! Hrm... okay. I'm slipping. Heh. Yeah. Anyway.
Regardless of how simple and striaght-forward the BitKeeper product may be, I think Mr. McVoy is forgetting that folks that do kernel development have been using tools such as gcc, as, emacs, vi, lint, m4 thingies, troff, make, info... XWindows (for the love of God!) Needless to say, your average kernel developer is probably not the typical oh-my-i-just-cant-figure-this-out-when-is-bill-go
sort of end user. If he really thinks he can bully the egg-head* community in such a fashion, he's either much more brilliant than he's coming off as or his visions of becoming a respected revision control system author are going to intersect quite abruptly with the particular variety of fate known as limited-lifespan (at least as it pertains to projects that have large groups of developers that just might actually work for a competitor).
On a different angle, if the kernel community does not decide to ditch BK for some reason, it will make for entertaining legal stories if/when Mr. McVoy starts having people hauled in. Can you imagine the kinds of goodies that will be drifting through the minds of those junior-assistant-undersecretary-to-the-person-who
Mr. McVoy, please. I beg of you. Our glorious leader is already making us look extremely silly and annoying to the rest of the planet! Please do not exaserbate the situation.
Praise Cheezewiz...
* this adjective used out of respect