everything that depends on it. KDE, Gnome, all my X applications... ack!
I don't know about your particular distro, but X applications should not depend on XFree86!
If Linux Mozilla, for example, needs an X11 server to run, there is no reason to require XFree86 on the same computer. The dependences should allow X applications to install without X itself- that's how you'd build a back-end application server.
it seems to me, that people are all off in a huff when MSFT bundles IE with their OS making it impossible to run a business simply making OS
No. You misunderstand public perception.
Nobody thinks that bundling IE & Win impacts the "making OS" industry- it effects the web browser industry (or consequential lack thereof).
And besides, Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, and it performed assorted crimal, fraudulent, or simply immoral acts to get that way. Thus it deserves harsher treatment than other businesses.
making it impossible to run a business selling only wifi.
The reason why selling WiFi won't become a profitable business is more fundamental. The "WiFi provider" business case just doesn't work. Everyplace where a customer might want a few hours of WiFi will already have some physical business in the area (restaurant, gas station, or something). All non-trivial businesses will possess an internet connection as part of their facilities. Given that they already have internet, adding free WiFi on top of that is almost too cheap to bother counting. The one-time price is around $200, and still falling as volunteers make the solution more and more turnkey.
The problem here is that the Segway is small enough to be lifted off the ground and dropped into a truck all within 10 seconds
I agree with you, but Dean Kamen claims that a technical solution (encrypted digital key) prevents a stolen Segway from being used.
In reality, Segways cannot be profitably stolen because they're still so rare that individual vehicle's sales history (based on a VIN-equivalent) can be easily traced. Hard to fence off a Segway. In a few years, if a used-Segway market emerges, that'll change.
(Even if stealing them isn't profitable yet, you're still vulnerable to people who just want to screw with the dorkmobile)
by the team of only two.
I can do it solo! The segway is far lighter than any motorbike, and it's more compact, so you can keep the weigh near your center of mass when lifting.
And yet, thousands of lines of code are written every minute using MSVC and other tools, for which no source is available at all.
So... you say that Java's current license is effectively about as Open Source as MSVC is... which is exactly what chickenwing was saying... so what's your point? You argue that OSS is irrelevant, which is separate from whether or not Java is OSS now.
Not really -- Sun accepts bug reports, and is unlikely to be worse about handling them than other major open-source projects.
That assertion has already been contradicted by the historical record.
and the downfall of its greatest feature 'write once, run anywhere'...
Doesn't work today, so what are they worried about?
Java already has "forks"... different JDK versions that have incompatible features, Portable Java (for PDAs/cellphones) that's a subset of the real thing, and of course those major "Java" apps that depend on nonportable JNI bindings (like eclipse swt).
Besides, even if Sun copylefts Java's source code, they'll still own the Java trademark, and can absolutely define what is or is not labelled "Java Compatible".
and the biggest thing is that the Segway is a lot faster if there are any hills involved!
It all depends on the exact geography of course, but I think that after two weeks of practice, the hills would cease to be a problem.
to get here and shower from all
If the shower is a consequence of having sweated on the trip, then Segways can share that problem. Automobiles can turn the air conditioning up to frosty levels, but of course Segways and bikes can't do this. They'll both have you exposed to hot sunlight for about the same length of time. Of course, the bike also involves some physical extertion, but I think in the summertime you'd sweat regardless.
Another point I neglected to mention is that bicycles and automobiles have a wheel diameter greater than twice that of a Segway. This becomes important when you get off of neat sidewalks and onto real roads, which can become highly non-smooth, especially at the edges. A thin bike wheel can navigate precisely around the edges of obstacles/potholes, which a Segway could not avoid without swinging way out into automotive traffic.
The segway is not meant to replace WALKING! It is meant to replace DRIVING...
Neither, really. It's suppose to fit a zone in between that has previously been poorly-serviced.
Do you walk to the grocery store?
That'd be an especially bad use of the Segway. Grocery customers buy numerous large bags, which you can't transport standing on a scooter. Keeping the purchase size down to what a Segway can carry would nessecitate more trips.
The Segway is meant to replace driving in short trips to and from locations between 10 and 15 miles from your departure point.
The Segway goes maybe 12 miles in an hour. Depending on road conditions, automobiles do between 20 and 60. For the 10-15 mile trips you're talking about, a car is the rational choice for the following reasons:
More than twice as fast, meaning a 10 mile trip is 20 minutes instead of 50. (Saving 60 minutes bidirectionally)
For trips longer than 15 miles, a car is needed. And since you've already got an expensive vehicle for long distance, why not use it for shortrange too?
Protected from the weather
Transport cargo/people
Less expensive (a used car starts at $400, 1/10th the price of a Segway)
Headlights for nighttime operation
Longer range (Segways die after less than 3 hours travel)
Segways don't do well compared with bicycles either. Bikes are about equivalent in terms of speed, cargo, and weather protection, but can cost just 1% of the sale price, and have the benefit of increasing the operator's cardiovascular health. Plus, in uncongested areas, the bike is faster too... and of course it goes longer between recharging.
The market niche for Segways is apparently people who'd like to make small bicycle-level trips, but are too obese to pedal themselves.
The goods were delivered subject to his future agreement to the remaining terms.
Totally wrong... if you can't tell that, I don't know how to help you.
The "goods" are a program on CD-ROM. They were "delivered" (for example) by a FedEx employee retained by the vendor. Non-agreement to the EULA in no way entitles the vendor to demand return of that CD-ROM.
Since in the absence of agreement, he can't keep the software at all,
Oh yes he can.
I see no reason why one cannot show agreement in private.
Again, if you don't understand 4-letter English words, I probably can't teach you. Of course, I could try explaining that it means "display or allow to be seen" or "indicate, register". The UCC means that people can enter a contract by means other than paper signatures, but only if that action somehow constitutes communication between the parties. That can be ensured if the action is one which the customer would have no right to do without permission from the vendor.
I strongly doubt it means to literally jump up and down and yell out "I agree! I agree!"
Let's conduct some experiments about expressing agreement in private. If you agree to send me $500, please click the "X" button in the upper right corner of this window at any time. Alternatively, if you agree to send me $10,000, please depress the break pedal of your automobile at any time.
Those cases are legally equivalent to each other, and to a software EULA. They all involve someone making a claim that your performance of an action will constitute a formal agreement to arbitrary promisary terms, regardless of your legal right to perform that action without her permission.
But that doesn't work- I have no right to prohibit your closing a web browser, or driving a car, because you either own all related property... or rather, I have no control over your use of that property. Neither does a software publisher have the right to prohibit installing it on a computer, if it has been lawfully purchased. (Remember that the USA's copyright law permits who has been granted a copy permission to make additional copies as needed to "use the product in the most normal way". In countries like the UK without such provisions, EULAs have some justifiable standing)
If copyright holders were allowed to revoke previously published copies, that might constitute the leverage needed to make EULAs valid. But as it stands today, the vendor of a book, music CD, or videogame cannot walk up to a past customer and demand the destruction of media bearing the copyrighted work, even if a reimbursement for the purchase-price is offered. Once you've given a copy, it's out of your control, per "first sale" (unless you got the customer to agree otherwise prior to providing the copy. But that's not the case with EULAs)
No, I don't think it would work at any time
Then you shouldn't like the ProCD ruling either. In that case, the contract was "agreed to" each time the software was executed.
it's an efficiency measure. It's impractical to discuss terms in the store, so they're discussed as soon as you have a real chance to dig into them.
Efficiency and convenience are not part of the law. Nor is the profit of a business model a legal guarrantee.
Legally, all times following the exchange of money and goods are equivalent. There is no difference between demanding the additional contract 30 minutes or 30 years after the transaction is finalized. The vendor surrendered control of the product as soon as he let you take it out of the store.
You earlier repeated the spurious claim that ruling against software EULAs would somehow harm other businesses that rely on contracts whose terms are revealed after money changes hands. Insurance and concert tickets were two examples given... but they have no relationship to providing software on CD-ROM. Both
In typical Microsoft fashion, they really didn't have anything.
That was the invention of what came to be called vaporware.
Why Microsoft thought the program manager was a good idea when the Macintosh showed otherwise, is a mystery that will forever remain unsolved.
A rumor says that it was Bill Gate's pride. Although in many ways Microsoft was willing to copy, they also had a "not invented here" attitude and included their own creations not on objective merit, but from emotional attachment. (They'd seen "clicking icons creates windows" on Mac, and thought progman.exe came close enough...)
Or it could've been an early form of "Macs are dumbed-down" bias... "If it isn't hard to use, it must not be powerful enough!"
Total sales, including the PC port, were about 2.5 million.
"Several" means 5 to 8. This has been measured by broad surveys of English speakers, and is used in the implementation of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Translation software. (Of course, the speakers surveyed expressed some variation in what they believed fuzzy number ranges to mean, but no one said "several" could mean less than 3)
.but then some goober will accidentally leave his WinXP laptop at some airport security screening location and POOF! there goes your unbreakable security.
No, the levels of loss are different. When the laptop is stolen by enemies, they gain access to all data on the laptop, which gives them a password they can use to view data the rest of your organization is currently transmitting... OR to decrypt any data they've logged you transmitting before.
If the organization used QC, that last threat is taken away. The damage from a compromised password is reduced, because the spies can't revist any old wiretap logs- for wiretapping QC is impossible.
If you are transmitting data across the internet using any kind of encryption besides OTP, then somebody can be sniffing it to a log. 50 years later, he can brute-force it with a Beowulf cluster of 40 terahertz cellphones. QC is immune to that too.
So if you're paranoid that a future historian will try to open your email, look into QC.
Once observed could you not recreate the photons within a super secret insertable relay device?
No. That's where the quantumness comes in. Each photon has multiple attributes to it... two different axes of polarization, let's say. The only way to measure one of those values is to bounce something off the photon, which would screw up the other value. So it's like there is a stream of bit-pairs {(01)(11)(00)(10)(10)(11)}, but you can only read one of the bits from each pair.
There is no way to reproduce a photon, because you cannot have measured it enough to know what both the values should be. (This doesn't bother the intented recipient, because he already knows which bits to try reading and which to ignore)
The concept is like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle... the more accurately you measure one attribute of a particle, the more you mess up the other characteristics.
I guess IPSEC or plain ol' SSH tunneling is more difficult to understand than quantum mechanics.
No... quantum "cryptography" has certain concrete advantages over normal mathematical encryption.
For IPSEC, SSH, or anything normal, a spy can record years worth of traffic between two victims. Then much later, burglarize or interrogate one of them to learn the password. (Or even spend 100 years of brute-force CPU crunching) With that, all of the logged messages become retroactively readable.
QC protects against this. There is no way a spy can record the data stream, because to view is to cut it (so the recipient will know something's wrong).
Maybe, Quantum Cryptography should be renamed "Quantum Wiretap Detection"...
Yes they are. The post you reference is talking about practicalities, not theoretics. It describes a communication system using two channels: a quantum one and a public one. Information describing which attributes of the quantum stream should be read are transmitted publiclly.
If the MIM could replace traffic on both the public and quantum streams, he can make a successful attack (both victims think they're talking to each other, but are really talking to MIM). But the assumption in that post is that the public channel will be a traditional radio broadcast, which would be difficult to block without detection (you'd need to secretly build giant antennas/faraday cages between the victims...)
So, the question reduces to "Is an MIM attack possible for FM radio broadcast?" And the answer to that is theoretically yes, although unlikely in practice.
No you can't. You will get plausible-looking false positives with equal frequency to the actual secret message. (And a password which you can attempt to guess has NOTHING to do with crypto)
It just means that in some situations, you can get out of the contract -- though you likely as not will have to give back whatever you got from the other person,
In the case of EULA, the minor got nothing for "agreeing". It wasn't presented before delivery of goods, after all. All he "got" was the box open (a box which, along with all of its contents, he had already paid for). So to exit the contract, he can just seal the box again...
Well, it's quite clear that you've never bothered to READ the ProCD opinion itself, despite your insulting the court.
That ruling is hilariously bad. It's based not on what laws say, but on business models that the judge decided he should support. Just read sec II para 5, where Easterbrook quotes UCC 2-204... the very section he quotes blatantly disagrees with his conclusions. (Opening a box in the privacy of my home is not "sufficient to show agreement" if the other party cannot see me. Nothing has been "shown"- incommuincato persons cannot enter a contract*)
Even the ProCD case takes pains to point out that EULAs will need to offer a meaningful choice to reject the terms once they're available.
The ability to reject is irrelevant- I never mentioned anything along those lines.
What I was alluding to as a "horrifying implication" was contract terms such as "You will pay $49.95 daily to the publisher, forever."
That's an extreme example, but its absurdity demonstrates that EULAs cannot be valid. If they really were a considered agreement between two parties, then any such onerous language would be binding.
Microsoft could, with complete legality, send specific Windows(tm) update packs to targeted individuals, demanding personalized concessions that would reap mindless "I Agree" clicks.
The idea that software installation (either clicking through checkboxes, or just unwrapping discs) is a circumstance where due consideration can be applied to a contract is just ludicrous. To think otherwise, the ProCD judge must have been stupid or drunk. I am insulting, but I cannot honestly react in any other manner.
Note that Easterbrook described a similar clause in his ruling (that same sec II para 5 I was laughing at earlier), but in a completely inadequate way:
a consumer opens a package to find an insert saying "you owe us an extra $10,000" and the seller files suit to collect. Any buyer finding such a demand can prevent formation of the contract by returning the package, as can any consumer who concludes that the terms of the license make the software worth less than the purchase price.
By saying that a consumer who finds that clause can escape by returning the software, he implies that someone who proceeds with the installation will then be bound by those terms!
If ProCD stands, vendors of any nontrivial product (durable good) will have the power to revoke usage at any time, by making arbitrary new demands that had not even been concieved when the sale was transacted.
Plus that would have ramifications, as ProCD points out, for a lot of other after-the-fact contracts, such as those found with airline tickets.
That's another place where ProCD is wrong. There is no ramification. Tickets or anything relating to a future service involve an ongoing relationship and are completely different from a concluded sales transaction. (Software like EverQuest which bundles online service excepted)
The only way they'd be similar is if copyright holders somehow had the right to whimsically withdraw permission to use after delivering the product. (Some publishers act like they can, but...)
* That doesn't undermine the GPL, by the way. The GPL can be considered an outstanding offer to contract, needing to be joined only if the parties eventually communicate. The same applies to any other deferred-communication contract so long as consideration is (eventually) exchanged.
You don't have any real reason to critizise Bush so you call him a draft dodger for joining the National Guard.
No, that's what Bush called it. He has admitted publically that he joined the Guard to avoid the draft.
That is funny, so he dodged the military draft by joining the military.
It's complicated, you'll have to think hard. But being drafted for Vietnam and volunteering to defend Texas are actually very different things. (Bush almost got 500 flight hours, which would've let him rotate to Vietnam... but whoops, he was disqualified from flying!)
Hmmm, yeah somehow his father is going to get him off the hook for dereliction,
Yep, that's exactly it. Military commanders are not willing to risk irritating Congressmen by getting their sons either killed or court martialed. Especially not if that father was a famous veteran. (That's the same reason Al Gore got a noncombat assignment)
Any other pilot who skipped out on his physical to get disqualified from his only useful job would've been at best a dishon.
I guess his old commander that a few months back said he remembered seing Bush there is part of this hugh Right-Wing Conspiricy cover up too, huh?
Or he just doesn't want to admit to failing to control his unit back then. It's more interesting that NO National Guardmen who served with Bush remember him there. It's tough to be on a base for 8 months without making at least one friend- that George must've been really shy!
My point was that Clinton downsized the military drastically.
And who created that downsizing plan, back before Clinton even took office? Rumsfeld...
Secondly, it isn't the saluting, but the fact that you can just tell Bush has respect for the military, where as Clinton didn't.
You can "just tell", huh? Ok, trusting your instincts... but I can just tell that Bush is an idiot, where as Clinton wasn't. Why, just yesterday, Bush claimed that WWII started with a sneak attack on the USA...
And hey, when Bush fired Shinseki for explaining that more troops would be needed to safely hold Iraq- that was really respectful, you think?
why a stretch... the Battlefield franchise does this pretty well, IMO.
Yes, but BattleField (1942 or Vietnam) is in a completely different position on the realism spectrum from Americas Army.
In AA, when you get killed, you're dead until the match is finished. BF allows a team of 15 to respawn 100s of times total.
That difference relaxes the negative effect different gamestyles have on each other, making them more compatible. Respawning makes it easier to fit activities on different scales into the same game- and helicopter travel is at a larger scale than CQB!
Basically, adding realistic moving vehicles means you need bigger maps to give them some room to manuver usefully. And bigger maps means it will be more possible for the last 2-3 guys alive in a game to spend quite a while slowly hunting for each other, without any conclusion.
AA is already teetering on the brink of being non-fun by forcing killed players to wait for the next round to play again. Any changes that increase the potential wait may devastate the game's popularity.
Many things limit contract law, including age of the customer... and as it happens, very many game buyers are too young to enter contracts.
So do you have any laws that ACTUALLY prohibit them from doing that?
It is plenty obvious that the ProCD decision will be struck down as soon as its elevated to a court with half a brain. Any judge who considers the implications of entering into an arbitrary contract by tearing open a box or "Click 'I Agree' to install" will be horrified.
After the inevitable happens* and the foundations of software EULAs are shattered, there will be no way contract law can apply to game sales. They'd have to sit you down at the counter and sign paperwork before handing you the box... and that extra work (and blatant customer-hostility) would be such a drain on sales it'd outweigh any supposed benefit of prohibited resale.
* If game publishers actually tried to prohibt resale in EULAs, they would only encourage a class-action suit and get ProCD reversed all the faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you be specific?
Could you be dyslexic?
(Hint: Brown is attacking Linus's reputation)
Libel is when you say something false
No, saying it would be slander. Putting it in a book, as Brown is doing, would be libel. (Pay attention to spiderman...)
everything that depends on it. KDE, Gnome, all my X applications... ack!
I don't know about your particular distro, but X applications should not depend on XFree86!
If Linux Mozilla, for example, needs an X11 server to run, there is no reason to require XFree86 on the same computer. The dependences should allow X applications to install without X itself- that's how you'd build a back-end application server.
Reminds me of in high school when our Windows 95 machines had Internet Explorer and Netscape removed.
What were they thinking? If web browsers were intentionally removed, then why even let students have TCP/IP internet access at all?
But Winamp was still on the machines,
What possible educational justification could there be to explicitly installing Winamp on a school computer?
it seems to me, that people are all off in a huff when MSFT bundles IE with their OS making it impossible to run a business simply making OS
No. You misunderstand public perception.
Nobody thinks that bundling IE & Win impacts the "making OS" industry- it effects the web browser industry (or consequential lack thereof).
And besides, Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, and it performed assorted crimal, fraudulent, or simply immoral acts to get that way. Thus it deserves harsher treatment than other businesses.
making it impossible to run a business selling only wifi.
The reason why selling WiFi won't become a profitable business is more fundamental. The "WiFi provider" business case just doesn't work. Everyplace where a customer might want a few hours of WiFi will already have some physical business in the area (restaurant, gas station, or something). All non-trivial businesses will possess an internet connection as part of their facilities. Given that they already have internet, adding free WiFi on top of that is almost too cheap to bother counting. The one-time price is around $200, and still falling as volunteers make the solution more and more turnkey.
The problem here is that the Segway is small enough to be lifted off the ground and dropped into a truck all within 10 seconds
I agree with you, but Dean Kamen claims that a technical solution (encrypted digital key) prevents a stolen Segway from being used.
In reality, Segways cannot be profitably stolen because they're still so rare that individual vehicle's sales history (based on a VIN-equivalent) can be easily traced. Hard to fence off a Segway. In a few years, if a used-Segway market emerges, that'll change.
(Even if stealing them isn't profitable yet, you're still vulnerable to people who just want to screw with the dorkmobile)
by the team of only two.
I can do it solo! The segway is far lighter than any motorbike, and it's more compact, so you can keep the weigh near your center of mass when lifting.
Just read the post history.
How about just reading the nickname? Although it's too bad that his journal went away, because it admitted his posting goals quite plainly.
However, it's too bad OCG has attracted these stalker downmods... he does some funny stuff.
Is it really that important to be able to distribute the built binaries for people?
Yes, that's extremely important. Why do you think Linux is 1,000,000 times as popular as Minix?
Because you can distribute modified binaries!! That was the WHOLE POINT of the existence of the single most successful open source project.
Please stop with the trolling!!
And yet, thousands of lines of code are written every minute using MSVC and other tools, for which no source is available at all.
So... you say that Java's current license is effectively about as Open Source as MSVC is... which is exactly what chickenwing was saying... so what's your point? You argue that OSS is irrelevant, which is separate from whether or not Java is OSS now.
Not really -- Sun accepts bug reports, and is unlikely to be worse about handling them than other major open-source projects.
That assertion has already been contradicted by the historical record.
and the downfall of its greatest feature 'write once, run anywhere'...
Doesn't work today, so what are they worried about?
Java already has "forks"... different JDK versions that have incompatible features, Portable Java (for PDAs/cellphones) that's a subset of the real thing, and of course those major "Java" apps that depend on nonportable JNI bindings (like eclipse swt).
Besides, even if Sun copylefts Java's source code, they'll still own the Java trademark, and can absolutely define what is or is not labelled "Java Compatible".
while gpl would not, right?
Wrong
and the biggest thing is that the Segway is a lot faster if there are any hills involved!
It all depends on the exact geography of course, but I think that after two weeks of practice, the hills would cease to be a problem.
to get here and shower from all
If the shower is a consequence of having sweated on the trip, then Segways can share that problem. Automobiles can turn the air conditioning up to frosty levels, but of course Segways and bikes can't do this. They'll both have you exposed to hot sunlight for about the same length of time. Of course, the bike also involves some physical extertion, but I think in the summertime you'd sweat regardless.
Another point I neglected to mention is that bicycles and automobiles have a wheel diameter greater than twice that of a Segway. This becomes important when you get off of neat sidewalks and onto real roads, which can become highly non-smooth, especially at the edges. A thin bike wheel can navigate precisely around the edges of obstacles/potholes, which a Segway could not avoid without swinging way out into automotive traffic.
they come out with a console that can play Nethack
Dreamcast had nethack years ago. PS2 has it today. It's run on xbox too, with a little hacking.
Neither, really. It's suppose to fit a zone in between that has previously been poorly-serviced.
Do you walk to the grocery store?
That'd be an especially bad use of the Segway. Grocery customers buy numerous large bags, which you can't transport standing on a scooter. Keeping the purchase size down to what a Segway can carry would nessecitate more trips.
The Segway is meant to replace driving in short trips to and from locations between 10 and 15 miles from your departure point.
The Segway goes maybe 12 miles in an hour. Depending on road conditions, automobiles do between 20 and 60. For the 10-15 mile trips you're talking about, a car is the rational choice for the following reasons:
Segways don't do well compared with bicycles either. Bikes are about equivalent in terms of speed, cargo, and weather protection, but can cost just 1% of the sale price, and have the benefit of increasing the operator's cardiovascular health.
Plus, in uncongested areas, the bike is faster too... and of course it goes longer between recharging.
The market niche for Segways is apparently people who'd like to make small bicycle-level trips, but are too obese to pedal themselves.
None of these on sidewalks, eh?
Why, yes, that is the regulation in most places... your point?
The goods were delivered subject to his future agreement to the remaining terms.
Totally wrong... if you can't tell that, I don't know how to help you.
The "goods" are a program on CD-ROM. They were "delivered" (for example) by a FedEx employee retained by the vendor. Non-agreement to the EULA in no way entitles the vendor to demand return of that CD-ROM.
Since in the absence of agreement, he can't keep the software at all,
Oh yes he can.
I see no reason why one cannot show agreement in private.
Again, if you don't understand 4-letter English words, I probably can't teach you. Of course, I could try explaining that it means "display or allow to be seen" or "indicate, register". The UCC means that people can enter a contract by means other than paper signatures, but only if that action somehow constitutes communication between the parties. That can be ensured if the action is one which the customer would have no right to do without permission from the vendor.
I strongly doubt it means to literally jump up and down and yell out "I agree! I agree!"
Let's conduct some experiments about expressing agreement in private. If you agree to send me $500, please click the "X" button in the upper right corner of this window at any time. Alternatively, if you agree to send me $10,000, please depress the break pedal of your automobile at any time.
Those cases are legally equivalent to each other, and to a software EULA. They all involve someone making a claim that your performance of an action will constitute a formal agreement to arbitrary promisary terms, regardless of your legal right to perform that action without her permission.
But that doesn't work- I have no right to prohibit your closing a web browser, or driving a car, because you either own all related property... or rather, I have no control over your use of that property. Neither does a software publisher have the right to prohibit installing it on a computer, if it has been lawfully purchased. (Remember that the USA's copyright law permits who has been granted a copy permission to make additional copies as needed to "use the product in the most normal way". In countries like the UK without such provisions, EULAs have some justifiable standing)
If copyright holders were allowed to revoke previously published copies, that might constitute the leverage needed to make EULAs valid. But as it stands today, the vendor of a book, music CD, or videogame cannot walk up to a past customer and demand the destruction of media bearing the copyrighted work, even if a reimbursement for the purchase-price is offered. Once you've given a copy, it's out of your control, per "first sale" (unless you got the customer to agree otherwise prior to providing the copy. But that's not the case with EULAs)
No, I don't think it would work at any time
Then you shouldn't like the ProCD ruling either. In that case, the contract was "agreed to" each time the software was executed.
it's an efficiency measure. It's impractical to discuss terms in the store, so they're discussed as soon as you have a real chance to dig into them.
Efficiency and convenience are not part of the law. Nor is the profit of a business model a legal guarrantee.
Legally, all times following the exchange of money and goods are equivalent. There is no difference between demanding the additional contract 30 minutes or 30 years after the transaction is finalized. The vendor surrendered control of the product as soon as he let you take it out of the store.
You earlier repeated the spurious claim that ruling against software EULAs would somehow harm other businesses that rely on contracts whose terms are revealed after money changes hands. Insurance and concert tickets were two examples given... but they have no relationship to providing software on CD-ROM. Both
In typical Microsoft fashion, they really didn't have anything.
That was the invention of what came to be called vaporware.
Why Microsoft thought the program manager was a good idea when the Macintosh showed otherwise, is a mystery that will forever remain unsolved.
A rumor says that it was Bill Gate's pride. Although in many ways Microsoft was willing to copy, they also had a "not invented here" attitude and included their own creations not on objective merit, but from emotional attachment. (They'd seen "clicking icons creates windows" on Mac, and thought progman.exe came close enough...)
Or it could've been an early form of "Macs are dumbed-down" bias... "If it isn't hard to use, it must not be powerful enough!"
Total sales, including the PC port, were about 2.5 million.
"Several" means 5 to 8. This has been measured by broad surveys of English speakers, and is used in the implementation of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Translation software. (Of course, the speakers surveyed expressed some variation in what they believed fuzzy number ranges to mean, but no one said "several" could mean less than 3)
.but then some goober will accidentally leave his WinXP laptop at some airport security screening location and POOF! there goes your unbreakable security.
No, the levels of loss are different.
When the laptop is stolen by enemies, they gain access to all data on the laptop, which gives them a password they can use to view data the rest of your organization is currently transmitting... OR to decrypt any data they've logged you transmitting before.
If the organization used QC, that last threat is taken away. The damage from a compromised password is reduced, because the spies can't revist any old wiretap logs- for wiretapping QC is impossible.
If you are transmitting data across the internet using any kind of encryption besides OTP, then somebody can be sniffing it to a log. 50 years later, he can brute-force it with a Beowulf cluster of 40 terahertz cellphones. QC is immune to that too.
So if you're paranoid that a future historian will try to open your email, look into QC.
Once observed could you not recreate the photons within a super secret insertable relay device?
No. That's where the quantumness comes in. Each photon has multiple attributes to it... two different axes of polarization, let's say. The only way to measure one of those values is to bounce something off the photon, which would screw up the other value. So it's like there is a stream of bit-pairs {(01)(11)(00)(10)(10)(11)}, but you can only read one of the bits from each pair.
There is no way to reproduce a photon, because you cannot have measured it enough to know what both the values should be. (This doesn't bother the intented recipient, because he already knows which bits to try reading and which to ignore)
The concept is like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle... the more accurately you measure one attribute of a particle, the more you mess up the other characteristics.
I guess IPSEC or plain ol' SSH tunneling is more difficult to understand than quantum mechanics.
No... quantum "cryptography" has certain concrete advantages over normal mathematical encryption.
For IPSEC, SSH, or anything normal, a spy can record years worth of traffic between two victims. Then much later, burglarize or interrogate one of them to learn the password. (Or even spend 100 years of brute-force CPU crunching) With that, all of the logged messages become retroactively readable.
QC protects against this. There is no way a spy can record the data stream, because to view is to cut it (so the recipient will know something's wrong).
Maybe, Quantum Cryptography should be renamed "Quantum Wiretap Detection"...
No they are not.
Yes they are. The post you reference is talking about practicalities, not theoretics. It describes a communication system using two channels: a quantum one and a public one. Information describing which attributes of the quantum stream should be read are transmitted publiclly.
If the MIM could replace traffic on both the public and quantum streams, he can make a successful attack (both victims think they're talking to each other, but are really talking to MIM). But the assumption in that post is that the public channel will be a traditional radio broadcast, which would be difficult to block without detection (you'd need to secretly build giant antennas/faraday cages between the victims...)
So, the question reduces to "Is an MIM attack possible for FM radio broadcast?" And the answer to that is theoretically yes, although unlikely in practice.
You can always do trial and error.
No you can't. You will get plausible-looking false positives with equal frequency to the actual secret message. (And a password which you can attempt to guess has NOTHING to do with crypto)
In the case of EULA, the minor got nothing for "agreeing". It wasn't presented before delivery of goods, after all. All he "got" was the box open (a box which, along with all of its contents, he had already paid for). So to exit the contract, he can just seal the box again...
Well, it's quite clear that you've never bothered to READ the ProCD opinion itself, despite your insulting the court.
I've read it more than 10 times...
That ruling is hilariously bad. It's based not on what laws say, but on business models that the judge decided he should support. Just read sec II para 5, where Easterbrook quotes UCC 2-204... the very section he quotes blatantly disagrees with his conclusions. (Opening a box in the privacy of my home is not "sufficient to show agreement" if the other party cannot see me. Nothing has been "shown"- incommuincato persons cannot enter a contract*)
Even the ProCD case takes pains to point out that EULAs will need to offer a meaningful choice to reject the terms once they're available.
The ability to reject is irrelevant- I never mentioned anything along those lines.
What I was alluding to as a "horrifying implication" was contract terms such as "You will pay $49.95 daily to the publisher, forever."
That's an extreme example, but its absurdity demonstrates that EULAs cannot be valid. If they really were a considered agreement between two parties, then any such onerous language would be binding.
Microsoft could, with complete legality, send specific Windows(tm) update packs to targeted individuals, demanding personalized concessions that would reap mindless "I Agree" clicks.
The idea that software installation (either clicking through checkboxes, or just unwrapping discs) is a circumstance where due consideration can be applied to a contract is just ludicrous. To think otherwise, the ProCD judge must have been stupid or drunk. I am insulting, but I cannot honestly react in any other manner.
Note that Easterbrook described a similar clause in his ruling (that same sec II para 5 I was laughing at earlier), but in a completely inadequate way:
By saying that a consumer who finds that clause can escape by returning the software, he implies that someone who proceeds with the installation will then be bound by those terms!
If ProCD stands, vendors of any nontrivial product (durable good) will have the power to revoke usage at any time, by making arbitrary new demands that had not even been concieved when the sale was transacted.
Plus that would have ramifications, as ProCD points out, for a lot of other after-the-fact contracts, such as those found with airline tickets.
That's another place where ProCD is wrong. There is no ramification. Tickets or anything relating to a future service involve an ongoing relationship and are completely different from a concluded sales transaction. (Software like EverQuest which bundles online service excepted)
The only way they'd be similar is if copyright holders somehow had the right to whimsically withdraw permission to use after delivering the product. (Some publishers act like they can, but...)
* That doesn't undermine the GPL, by the way. The GPL can be considered an outstanding offer to contract, needing to be joined only if the parties eventually communicate. The same applies to any other deferred-communication contract so long as consideration is (eventually) exchanged.
You don't have any real reason to critizise Bush so you call him a draft dodger for joining the National Guard.
No, that's what Bush called it. He has admitted publically that he joined the Guard to avoid the draft.
That is funny, so he dodged the military draft by joining the military.
It's complicated, you'll have to think hard. But being drafted for Vietnam and volunteering to defend Texas are actually very different things. (Bush almost got 500 flight hours, which would've let him rotate to Vietnam... but whoops, he was disqualified from flying!)
Hmmm, yeah somehow his father is going to get him off the hook for dereliction,
Yep, that's exactly it. Military commanders are not willing to risk irritating Congressmen by getting their sons either killed or court martialed. Especially not if that father was a famous veteran. (That's the same reason Al Gore got a noncombat assignment)
Any other pilot who skipped out on his physical to get disqualified from his only useful job would've been at best a dishon.
I guess his old commander that a few months back said he remembered seing Bush there is part of this hugh Right-Wing Conspiricy cover up too, huh?
Or he just doesn't want to admit to failing to control his unit back then. It's more interesting that NO National Guardmen who served with Bush remember him there. It's tough to be on a base for 8 months without making at least one friend- that George must've been really shy!
My point was that Clinton downsized the military drastically.
And who created that downsizing plan, back before Clinton even took office? Rumsfeld...
Secondly, it isn't the saluting, but the fact that you can just tell Bush has respect for the military, where as Clinton didn't.
You can "just tell", huh? Ok, trusting your instincts... but I can just tell that Bush is an idiot, where as Clinton wasn't. Why, just yesterday, Bush claimed that WWII started with a sneak attack on the USA...
And hey, when Bush fired Shinseki for explaining that more troops would be needed to safely hold Iraq- that was really respectful, you think?
why a stretch... the Battlefield franchise does this pretty well, IMO.
Yes, but BattleField (1942 or Vietnam) is in a completely different position on the realism spectrum from Americas Army.
In AA, when you get killed, you're dead until the match is finished. BF allows a team of 15 to respawn 100s of times total.
That difference relaxes the negative effect different gamestyles have on each other, making them more compatible. Respawning makes it easier to fit activities on different scales into the same game- and helicopter travel is at a larger scale than CQB!
Basically, adding realistic moving vehicles means you need bigger maps to give them some room to manuver usefully. And bigger maps means it will be more possible for the last 2-3 guys alive in a game to spend quite a while slowly hunting for each other, without any conclusion.
AA is already teetering on the brink of being non-fun by forcing killed players to wait for the next round to play again. Any changes that increase the potential wait may devastate the game's popularity.
BUT FIRST SALE DOES NOT LIMIT CONTRACT LAW
Many things limit contract law, including age of the customer... and as it happens, very many game buyers are too young to enter contracts.
So do you have any laws that ACTUALLY prohibit them from doing that?
It is plenty obvious that the ProCD decision will be struck down as soon as its elevated to a court with half a brain. Any judge who considers the implications of entering into an arbitrary contract by tearing open a box or "Click 'I Agree' to install" will be horrified.
After the inevitable happens* and the foundations of software EULAs are shattered, there will be no way contract law can apply to game sales. They'd have to sit you down at the counter and sign paperwork before handing you the box... and that extra work (and blatant customer-hostility) would be such a drain on sales it'd outweigh any supposed benefit of prohibited resale.
* If game publishers actually tried to prohibt resale in EULAs, they would only encourage a class-action suit and get ProCD reversed all the faster.