Who says they were less intelligent? Their brains were bigger.
Cows have much bigger brains than humans, but are significantly less intelligent. Some whales have brains larger than an entire human, and they're still less intelligent.
Because the brain controls all muscles, larger creatures have a bigger brain even if they're not really smarter. To compare intelligence without the luxury of watching the creature in action, the best plan is to use the ratio of body size to brain size.
By that metric, the neanderthal comes out worse than a homo sapien. It's brain is larger, but the body is larger by an even greater proportion. Until a cloned neanderthal sits for an IQ test, this size comparison is the best we can do.
the founding fathers understood that the new always builds upon the old, and recognized the value of a rich commons.
Obviously I know this. A large public domain is useful for progress in the arts and science. "Progress" is their stated goal, "limited time" is a tool towards reaching that goal.
Seriously, what part of this is hard for you to understand? It's as if you're claiming my goal getting up each morning is to drive around my car (A), when really I just want to get to work (B) so I can earn some cash (C) to buy some things that keep me happy (D). It's wrong to claim A,B, or C is the goal, when all I want is D.
the goal is not simply to fund production of content for a price, but to move that content *into the public domain*.
Are you really incapable of reading the text you just pasted?
"To do A, by doing B". This says A is the goal and B is how to achieve it. Compare it against the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
It obviously says the goal is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", which is different from "move everything into public domain". The public domain is one way to promote progress, but not the only way. And the public domain is only a means to the end of progress, not an end in itself.
Last time, IIRC, it was Larry Lessig arguing against the DMCA. Instead of just fighting the DMCA, Lessig had to try to fight the whole goddamn copyright reform war in one go
Totally wrong. Lessig was never fighting the DMCA at all. His lawsuit was about extensions and only extensions. They are blatantly unconstitutional, but he failed to prove it (for which he is rightly ashamed).
Lessig punched a hole in the bottom of his boat, killed the battle against the DMCA.
Even though Lessig wasn't trying to hurt the DMCA, he accidently did. It looks like the Eldred opinion undermines the DMCA's constitutionality.
Lessig had to try to fight the whole goddamn copyright reform war in one go,
Wrong. He didn't cover all the bases on the copyright war- and in retrospect, that was a big mistake. Reading the decision, several of the judges were partially favorable to him, and others would've been favorable to arguments he didn't make. Tossing out more rationalizations would've actually made it more likely that 5 judges would've each found one willing to convince him/her.
It would cause *chaos* in the business world. There are *vast* pragmatic issues.
Wrong and wrong. It would do hardly anything to the business world. A couple of big companies would lose a $20 million dollars of anticipated revenue, and a hundred other corporations would pick up $1 million each in quick reprints, but that isn't nearly "chaos".
sure as hell not going to pass muster before a bunch of crochety Justices.
Read their actual opinions. See how some of them were disappointed he didn't strike harder at the point that today's long copyright does not encourage the progress of art, which is as strongly unconstituional as you can get.
struck down in previous cases this case would probably never have made it to court.
Nope. WoW is a service, not software. Properly, software EULAs would've been invalidated back in the ProCD case, but that still would've left Blizzard on strong legal footing here.
Shrinkwrap or tearthrough EULAs shouldn't work because doing an action in the privacy of your own home is no way to make a contract with a distant stranger who can't even tell if you did the action or not.
However, if somebody gives you a Terms of Service document and you mail her back money paying for that service, then it does show you've made a contract. Sending that money communicates affirmative consent.
AC says: A copy that you wouldn't have had the right to make without the GPL.
Wrong. "You", the end-user, don't need to make a copy. Instead, a 3rd party can make it for you... just like YOU already said:
you or some other third-party made a copy.
Therefore, because a 3rd party can make the copy for you, the end-user never needs to agree to the GPL, or even be made aware of it (except that interactive programs will put it on the splashscreen).
But the GPL still has to explicitely tell the user they may use the software however they choose, they just don't go into great length to limit its use.
No it does not. The GPL mentions as an FYI that you can use the software for whatever purpose you like- that's because there is no legal grounds by which they could demand otherwise.
Once software is in your hands, the author (or other copyright holder) can't make any demands about what you do with it.
However, distribution is still use EULAs and the GPL both set restriction son distribution.
Wrong again. Repeatly lying about the contents of globally available documents makes you look not only dishonest, but stupid as well.
The GPL makes no restriction on distribution. Distribution is already restricted by copyright law, so if there were no license file at all, it would still be entirely illegal for you to redistribute a program. The GPL removes pre-existing restrictions in certain cases.
Since the point of the limited monpolies we grant in our IP systems is to get useful content into public domain,
No. The point is to get useful stuff created and published. Check the Constitution... check anyplace.
"Public domain" would be the state of all creative IP if there were no IP law system, but if that were the case, then new corporate works wouldn't be published without firm non-redistribution contracts first.
You would need to go to their office(s), speak to their representatives and verify the credentials of those representatives.
That still won't work. How do you know it's a genuine Debian representative, and not a disguised Gentoo spy? He could've tied up the real crew in a closet just before you came in, all part of a huge conspiracy to hack your PC (secretly forcing everything to recompile).
You would need to go to their office(s), speak to their representatives and verify the credentials of those representatives.
As just implied, the truth of that so-called "need" depends on just how hugely paranoid you are. While it's true that GPG keys can be tampered with if transported over the internet (either by man-in-the-middle, or subverting the Debian server), they're still useful.
For an attack to be successful, the tampering must be uninterrupted: in place when you got the key, when you download the packages, and every other time you re-verify the key inbetween. If the active tampering is ever discontinued, either you or the remote admin will detect the attack.
In particular, if Debian's server was OK when you got the key and then is hacked later, the key will protect you from altered packages. That alone creates a very big probability region of removed vulnerability. (Especially useful because the packages are likely to be supplied by 3rd party mirror-servers that pay far less attention to their own security)
Nobody has mentioned XDR yet. Although it's probably not what you'd really prefer (as NetCDF seems to be very popular with CFD projects, and there's presumably a good reason), I'll describe it for completeness. EXternal Data Represenation it sits nicely in the midpoint between pure native data and human-readable text of the numbers (including XML).
Free libxdr code is available everyplace, although often quite ancient (some written in 1982 or so). Just run your data structs through xdr calls, write it out with the MPI native interface, and apply reverse versions of the same calls when loading. It's a lot like the htonl/ntohl functions you may be familiar with (but more elaborate, of course, because it handles marshalling and padding in addition to just endianness).
Advantage of XDR: files are portable, but hardly any bigger than the original data in RAM (prehaps even a little smaller)
Disadvantage of XDR: files are not human-readable, decellerating the processes of debugging or informing others how to inspect your files. Plus, it simply lacks the cool-factor of XML.
Wouldn't a better solution be to limit the amount of time per day everyone can play?
And also, TV could only let you watch 8 hours / week. Cars that don't ever go above 65 m/h. And McDonalds should stop selling burgers once you've eaten 500 Calories.
When a business decides to explicitly countermand customer requests in the name of "their best intrests", they rapidly cease to have customers at all.
(Under-utilized at present) areas of gaming for the interested.
So not only are they acting against the wishes of their customers, but also spending a huge amout of development time building crunchy replacements for the actually fun parts.
it's vastly faster for me to zip up to the menu bar at top than to actually take the milliseconds to aim carefully at widgets in the local window
Right. So when you're done with the menu bar, and need to get BACK to that relatively small window someplace else on the screen? That's where the accuracy complaint really comes from.
Of course, a variant kind of popup menu (such as a pie) can be better than either menubar style: the menu targets are "infinitely big", plus your cursor is still near the document when done.
Let's say, somebody breaks into a Debian mirror and replaces sshd with a version with a backdoor. If code signing was in place, you could notice it quite easily.
You've got some typos there. The word "if" falsely implies that Debian doesn't already do this. Replace it with "because". Several other words should be changed to past tense.
Why the hell should the federal government pay for a freaking ROAD in Boston, which it hasn't needed for the past two hundred years, and they shouldn't pay for food, shelter, and clean water for citizens who have just had their life savings and home destroyed?
Given that federal taxes already go to local road projects, it's only fair. Even taking that ludicrously bloated project into account, Massachusetts has still given out far more federal highway taxes than it has recieved.
If you're serious, why don't you propose that Boston impose a 30% sales tax increase
Effectively, that is what happened, since the Big Dig was paid for with just a partial refund of MA's federal taxes.
So if you want to attack the propriety of the Big Dig spending, you've got to do it as an assault on the principle of national money for local improvements as a whole. And for that subject, Don Young's Way is a better example than the Big Dig (which at least will service millions of non-MA residents annually)
African hunting and gathering tribes survive by working 3 to 4 hours a day.
They're only able to survive on such little work because they're supported by the industrialized world around them. A few dollars worth of T-shirts, stainless-steel knives, and discarded soft-drink bottles replaces equipment that would've taken years of labor to construct from local natural materials.
They're not subsidized in any way whatsoever;
It's likely that the Discovery Channel TV crews try to steer you away from looking closely at the reliance on alien artifacts. But it is there.
Archeologically, it is well documented that the transition from hunter/gather to stationary agriculture greatly increased average leisure.
they said it verbatim on today's episode of Going Tribal
Surely you jest; that show is a parade of romantasized misdirection.
That said, semantic enhancements matter more than performance, and it is better to do something semantically than to do nothing, and what Linux currently is doing is nothing.
Because performance isn't too important for semantic enhancements, they can be implemented successfully in userspace. Nothing need change in the kernel at all, except possibly as a speed optimization after the system is already working effectively (compare with nfs servers; Linux users can run them as user or kernel according to need)
If you want to build a good semantic filesystem, you can work much faster without getting bogged down into low-level stability critical code. Once you've got some compelling applications using advanced FS semantics, there'll be less opposition to supportive kernel patches.
Been in development about as long as Duke Nukem Forever.
Prior art only counts if it has been published. You can invent something and use it privately for years- then suddenly someone else patents it, and it's illegal for you to keep using your own idea.
They don't have to be, the terms of their license is what governs the terms of the license they offer me. They have a contract to distribute, and created a contract with me as a result of that.
No, Blockbuster and other rental chains don't have any special contract with the film companies. They buy copies, and rent them out because anyone owning a legal copy of a work has the right to rental.
Back when VHS was new (and Beta was still around) there was a major lawsuit between the studios and the first rental chain, which established strong precedence for that interpretation.
In practice, there is an appearance of a special contract because studios release VHS and DVDs in two pricing stages. The initial $75 price is affordable only to rental stores, so home viewers wait until it is later "priced to own".
Nonetheless, Blockbuster has no contract with the copyright holder. (And even if they did, it wouldn't change the interpretation under fair-use law)
ruled several times that I've got a right to format shift
A right which terminates when the original format goes out of your possession.
I don't know if it's legal, but the courts let Blizzard keep that sort of language and actually enforce it.
No, the Blizzard WoW case is not similar. That's regarding an online service, not merely a software EULA. With WoW, you get the terms, read them, and then begin sending Blizzard money each month- an affirmative consent, of which both parties are aware.
Clickthrough EULAs for software are totally different, and have no legal justification for being binding. The publisher doesn't provide the consumer with any service once the "agreement" has been read- nor is the publisher even aware of whether or not agreement has been "indicated" at all.
but do not install it, you never have to agree to the license.
Even if I do install it, I'm still not agreeing to the license. Installing software is not a means of communicating agreement. Indeed, it isn't a means of communicating anything, because no data is transmitted back to the publisher revealing that I installed or not. The only way installation could be tantamount to acceptance is if you've already agreed to the terms of the EULA.
A version of software can only read its own files, not any other version's files.
That is your personal hypothesis about how TC might work, and actually implementing it that way would be ludicriously implausible except for uncommon special cases. Some P2P services might wish to operate that way, but document and media viewers will not want to lock their files into exactly one version with no forward compatibility.
Hey, feel like contradicting yourself?
A modified executable functions just fine.
It works fine!
screwed if you wanted to read data files from some other version. In other words you will be screwed.
It doesn't work fine! (have fun with that)
Microsoft could publish the hashes of their DRM enforecing webbrowsers... an entirely unsigned list...
If it's an unsigned list, then it can be spoofed, and is worthless for DRM enforcement. But the signing isn't what makes it a GPL violation: it's the hash itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Who says they were less intelligent? Their brains were bigger.
Cows have much bigger brains than humans, but are significantly less intelligent. Some whales have brains larger than an entire human, and they're still less intelligent.
Because the brain controls all muscles, larger creatures have a bigger brain even if they're not really smarter. To compare intelligence without the luxury of watching the creature in action, the best plan is to use the ratio of body size to brain size.
By that metric, the neanderthal comes out worse than a homo sapien. It's brain is larger, but the body is larger by an even greater proportion. Until a cloned neanderthal sits for an IQ test, this size comparison is the best we can do.
Unlike you,
Wrong. Practice reading.
the founding fathers understood that the new always builds upon the old, and recognized the value of a rich commons.
Obviously I know this. A large public domain is useful for progress in the arts and science. "Progress" is their stated goal, "limited time" is a tool towards reaching that goal.
Seriously, what part of this is hard for you to understand? It's as if you're claiming my goal getting up each morning is to drive around my car (A), when really I just want to get to work (B) so I can earn some cash (C) to buy some things that keep me happy (D). It's wrong to claim A,B, or C is the goal, when all I want is D.
the goal is not simply to fund production of content for a price, but to move that content *into the public domain*.
Are you really incapable of reading the text you just pasted?
"To do A, by doing B". This says A is the goal and B is how to achieve it. Compare it against the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
It obviously says the goal is to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", which is different from "move everything into public domain". The public domain is one way to promote progress, but not the only way. And the public domain is only a means to the end of progress, not an end in itself.
Last time, IIRC, it was Larry Lessig arguing against the DMCA. Instead of just fighting the DMCA, Lessig had to try to fight the whole goddamn copyright reform war in one go
Totally wrong. Lessig was never fighting the DMCA at all. His lawsuit was about extensions and only extensions. They are blatantly unconstitutional, but he failed to prove it (for which he is rightly ashamed).
Lessig punched a hole in the bottom of his boat, killed the battle against the DMCA.
Even though Lessig wasn't trying to hurt the DMCA, he accidently did. It looks like the Eldred opinion undermines the DMCA's constitutionality.
Lessig had to try to fight the whole goddamn copyright reform war in one go,
Wrong. He didn't cover all the bases on the copyright war- and in retrospect, that was a big mistake. Reading the decision, several of the judges were partially favorable to him, and others would've been favorable to arguments he didn't make. Tossing out more rationalizations would've actually made it more likely that 5 judges would've each found one willing to convince him/her.
It would cause *chaos* in the business world. There are *vast* pragmatic issues.
Wrong and wrong. It would do hardly anything to the business world. A couple of big companies would lose a $20 million dollars of anticipated revenue, and a hundred other corporations would pick up $1 million each in quick reprints, but that isn't nearly "chaos".
sure as hell not going to pass muster before a bunch of crochety Justices.
Read their actual opinions. See how some of them were disappointed he didn't strike harder at the point that today's long copyright does not encourage the progress of art, which is as strongly unconstituional as you can get.
struck down in previous cases this case would probably never have made it to court.
Nope. WoW is a service, not software. Properly, software EULAs would've been invalidated back in the ProCD case, but that still would've left Blizzard on strong legal footing here.
Shrinkwrap or tearthrough EULAs shouldn't work because doing an action in the privacy of your own home is no way to make a contract with a distant stranger who can't even tell if you did the action or not.
However, if somebody gives you a Terms of Service document and you mail her back money paying for that service, then it does show you've made a contract. Sending that money communicates affirmative consent.
AC says: A copy that you wouldn't have had the right to make without the GPL.
Wrong. "You", the end-user, don't need to make a copy. Instead, a 3rd party can make it for you... just like YOU already said:
you or some other third-party made a copy.
Therefore, because a 3rd party can make the copy for you, the end-user never needs to agree to the GPL, or even be made aware of it (except that interactive programs will put it on the splashscreen).
But the GPL still has to explicitely tell the user they may use the software however they choose, they just don't go into great length to limit its use.
No it does not. The GPL mentions as an FYI that you can use the software for whatever purpose you like- that's because there is no legal grounds by which they could demand otherwise.
Once software is in your hands, the author (or other copyright holder) can't make any demands about what you do with it.
However, distribution is still use EULAs and the GPL both set restriction son distribution.
Wrong again. Repeatly lying about the contents of globally available documents makes you look not only dishonest, but stupid as well.
The GPL makes no restriction on distribution. Distribution is already restricted by copyright law, so if there were no license file at all, it would still be entirely illegal for you to redistribute a program. The GPL removes pre-existing restrictions in certain cases.
Since the point of the limited monpolies we grant in our IP systems is to get useful content into public domain,
No. The point is to get useful stuff created and published. Check the Constitution... check anyplace.
"Public domain" would be the state of all creative IP if there were no IP law system, but if that were the case, then new corporate works wouldn't be published without firm non-redistribution contracts first.
You would need to go to their office(s), speak to their representatives and verify the credentials of those representatives.
That still won't work. How do you know it's a genuine Debian representative, and not a disguised Gentoo spy? He could've tied up the real crew in a closet just before you came in, all part of a huge conspiracy to hack your PC (secretly forcing everything to recompile).
You would need to go to their office(s), speak to their representatives and verify the credentials of those representatives.
As just implied, the truth of that so-called "need" depends on just how hugely paranoid you are. While it's true that GPG keys can be tampered with if transported over the internet (either by man-in-the-middle, or subverting the Debian server), they're still useful.
For an attack to be successful, the tampering must be uninterrupted: in place when you got the key, when you download the packages, and every other time you re-verify the key inbetween. If the active tampering is ever discontinued, either you or the remote admin will detect the attack.
In particular, if Debian's server was OK when you got the key and then is hacked later, the key will protect you from altered packages. That alone creates a very big probability region of removed vulnerability. (Especially useful because the packages are likely to be supplied by 3rd party mirror-servers that pay far less attention to their own security)
Nobody has mentioned XDR yet. Although it's probably not what you'd really prefer (as NetCDF seems to be very popular with CFD projects, and there's presumably a good reason), I'll describe it for completeness. EXternal Data Represenation it sits nicely in the midpoint between pure native data and human-readable text of the numbers (including XML).
Free libxdr code is available everyplace, although often quite ancient (some written in 1982 or so). Just run your data structs through xdr calls, write it out with the MPI native interface, and apply reverse versions of the same calls when loading. It's a lot like the htonl/ntohl functions you may be familiar with (but more elaborate, of course, because it handles marshalling and padding in addition to just endianness).
Advantage of XDR: files are portable, but hardly any bigger than the original data in RAM (prehaps even a little smaller)
Disadvantage of XDR: files are not human-readable, decellerating the processes of debugging or informing others how to inspect your files. Plus, it simply lacks the cool-factor of XML.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1832.html
Wouldn't a better solution be to limit the amount of time per day everyone can play?
And also, TV could only let you watch 8 hours / week.
Cars that don't ever go above 65 m/h.
And McDonalds should stop selling burgers once you've eaten 500 Calories.
When a business decides to explicitly countermand customer requests in the name of "their best intrests", they rapidly cease to have customers at all.
(Under-utilized at present) areas of gaming for the interested.
So not only are they acting against the wishes of their customers, but also spending a huge amout of development time building crunchy replacements for the actually fun parts.
I think that pretty much says it all.
Whatever personal "paramount object" Lincoln had, doesn't change the fact that the war was about slavery.
If the Civil War was really about state's rights, then it's equally logical to say that a burglar killing a homeowner was acting in self-defense.
it's vastly faster for me to zip up to the menu bar at top than to actually take the milliseconds to aim carefully at widgets in the local window
Right. So when you're done with the menu bar, and need to get BACK to that relatively small window someplace else on the screen? That's where the accuracy complaint really comes from.
Of course, a variant kind of popup menu (such as a pie) can be better than either menubar style: the menu targets are "infinitely big", plus your cursor is still near the document when done.
Let's say, somebody breaks into a Debian mirror and replaces sshd with a version with a backdoor. If code signing was in place, you could notice it quite easily.
You've got some typos there. The word "if" falsely implies that Debian doesn't already do this. Replace it with "because". Several other words should be changed to past tense.
Desktop Search will fail (or at least stay unimportant), the same way every meta data scheme out there has failed.
If Google Desktop were a meta-data scheme, you might have a point.
(see web page meta tags e.g.)
The quality of Google's web search results are an emphatic demonstration that they can defeat spam-like attempts to tilt results.
Yes, jackass, our Constitution gives the President that power.
Go ahead, paste that bit and show us. Oh wait! You can't... because it doesn't exist!
Why the hell should the federal government pay for a freaking ROAD in Boston, which it hasn't needed for the past two hundred years, and they shouldn't pay for food, shelter, and clean water for citizens who have just had their life savings and home destroyed?
Given that federal taxes already go to local road projects, it's only fair. Even taking that ludicrously bloated project into account, Massachusetts has still given out far more federal highway taxes than it has recieved.
If you're serious, why don't you propose that Boston impose a 30% sales tax increase
Effectively, that is what happened, since the Big Dig was paid for with just a partial refund of MA's federal taxes.
So if you want to attack the propriety of the Big Dig spending, you've got to do it as an assault on the principle of national money for local improvements as a whole. And for that subject, Don Young's Way is a better example than the Big Dig (which at least will service millions of non-MA residents annually)
African hunting and gathering tribes survive by working 3 to 4 hours a day.
They're only able to survive on such little work because they're supported by the industrialized world around them. A few dollars worth of T-shirts, stainless-steel knives, and discarded soft-drink bottles replaces equipment that would've taken years of labor to construct from local natural materials.
They're not subsidized in any way whatsoever;
It's likely that the Discovery Channel TV crews try to steer you away from looking closely at the reliance on alien artifacts. But it is there.
Archeologically, it is well documented that the transition from hunter/gather to stationary agriculture greatly increased average leisure.
they said it verbatim on today's episode of Going Tribal
Surely you jest; that show is a parade of romantasized misdirection.
That said, semantic enhancements matter more than performance, and it is better to do something semantically than to do nothing, and what Linux currently is doing is nothing.
Because performance isn't too important for semantic enhancements, they can be implemented successfully in userspace. Nothing need change in the kernel at all, except possibly as a speed optimization after the system is already working effectively (compare with nfs servers; Linux users can run them as user or kernel according to need)
If you want to build a good semantic filesystem, you can work much faster without getting bogged down into low-level stability critical code. Once you've got some compelling applications using advanced FS semantics, there'll be less opposition to supportive kernel patches.
Been in development about as long as Duke Nukem Forever.
Prior art only counts if it has been published. You can invent something and use it privately for years- then suddenly someone else patents it, and it's illegal for you to keep using your own idea.
Don't forget to download tatters.torrent and friedmushrooms.torrent too.
And please, do your part to fight world hunger: leave your BitTorrent window open after the download completes!
They don't have to be, the terms of their license is what governs the terms of the license they offer me. They have a contract to distribute, and created a contract with me as a result of that.
No, Blockbuster and other rental chains don't have any special contract with the film companies. They buy copies, and rent them out because anyone owning a legal copy of a work has the right to rental.
Back when VHS was new (and Beta was still around) there was a major lawsuit between the studios and the first rental chain, which established strong precedence for that interpretation.
In practice, there is an appearance of a special contract because studios release VHS and DVDs in two pricing stages. The initial $75 price is affordable only to rental stores, so home viewers wait until it is later "priced to own".
Nonetheless, Blockbuster has no contract with the copyright holder. (And even if they did, it wouldn't change the interpretation under fair-use law)
ruled several times that I've got a right to format shift
A right which terminates when the original format goes out of your possession.
I don't know if it's legal, but the courts let Blizzard keep that sort of language and actually enforce it.
No, the Blizzard WoW case is not similar. That's regarding an online service, not merely a software EULA. With WoW, you get the terms, read them, and then begin sending Blizzard money each month- an affirmative consent, of which both parties are aware.
Clickthrough EULAs for software are totally different, and have no legal justification for being binding. The publisher doesn't provide the consumer with any service once the "agreement" has been read- nor is the publisher even aware of whether or not agreement has been "indicated" at all.
but do not install it, you never have to agree to the license.
Even if I do install it, I'm still not agreeing to the license. Installing software is not a means of communicating agreement. Indeed, it isn't a means of communicating anything, because no data is transmitted back to the publisher revealing that I installed or not. The only way installation could be tantamount to acceptance is if you've already agreed to the terms of the EULA.
The idea that clicking "Accept" represents a contract is not one that would be good to support.
Fine, but that's irrelevant here. To join an MMORPG you do much more than just "click Accept"- you authorize monthly payments from a credit card.
The idea that making scheduled monthly payments represents a contract is how electricity and telephone companies work, and is good to support.
A version of software can only read its own files, not any other version's files.
That is your personal hypothesis about how TC might work, and actually implementing it that way would be ludicriously implausible except for uncommon special cases. Some P2P services might wish to operate that way, but document and media viewers will not want to lock their files into exactly one version with no forward compatibility.
Hey, feel like contradicting yourself?
A modified executable functions just fine.
It works fine!
screwed if you wanted to read data files from some other version. In other words you will be screwed.
It doesn't work fine! (have fun with that)
Microsoft could publish the hashes of their DRM enforecing webbrowsers... an entirely unsigned list...
If it's an unsigned list, then it can be spoofed, and is worthless for DRM enforcement. But the signing isn't what makes it a GPL violation: it's the hash itself.