Jebus H Christ, man! Have you seen my parents?!? I don't want to think of my conception AT ALL! I like to think that I was unceremoniously dropped down the chimney by a big, hairy pterodactyl.
Okay, of all the things that are starting to get to me, this tops it off. First off, I agree Saddam needed to be removed from power. He should have been taken down YEARS ago. Problem is, the US PR machine has warped things beyond any semblance of reality. The motives for this war was not mercy for the Iraqi people, it was political and financial. However, "We're doing this because we're greedy bastards" sounds bad. So make up a few stories about
WMD and stop ignoring human rights violations where it's convienent, and we have a war the people can rally behind. Never mind that the USA PUT Saddam in power in the first place (knowing what he was like, 'cuz they trained him!) and gave him all the chemical weapons that he could ever want (they also supplied Iran at the same time). Never mind that UN sanctions killed more Iraqi civillians through malnourishment and witholding life-saving medical supplies than Saddam ever did. And let's not forget, during early Desert Storm (technically, never ended - go figure!) the US millitary distributed propoganda asking for Iraqi civillian help in fighting Saddam's forces, promising to help them take Saddam out of power. One the US troops were minimized, they forgot about their end of the bargain. And before anyone - ANYONE - says that this was about helping the people of Iraq, look at China and North Korea. China needs help more than Iraq does, and Kim Jong Il is worse than Saddam. Saddam always denied having WMD. Kim Jong Il, on the other hand, has basically said "I have nukes, and Los Angeles will be wiped off the map if George W so much as looks at me funny". He is also rumored to treat his people worse than Saddam. Where's the millitary action there?
The US has a history of this shit. Look at Noriega. The man was a CIA operative since 1966, and put in power through drug running, assasination and elections rigging. Those CIA boys sure are helpful, ain't they? They ignored the mass slaughter Noriega conducted until he stopped reporting to them. After that, he HAD to be taken down for the good of the people of Panama! Sound familliar?
Remember, the CIA also trained the Taliban and a young Osama bin Laden. There was money and weapons provided so they could "fight the opressors" (the USSR at the time). Never mind that the USSR had no interest in Afghanistan until the USA started supporting the small and inoffensive country. This support was provided expressley to provoke a USSR invasion (if the USA wants to help them so badly, we must destroy them!). After the Soviets were driven out, the CIA put the Taliban in place. We should all remember how that ended.
People wonder why there is so much hatred towards the USA. It's because the government is so power hungry they just have to "play" in other coutries to wrestle just a little more control. They can't mind their own damn business. I'm not saying they shouldn't clean up a few things (like Saddam), but if the US didn't stick it's nose where it didn't belong in the first place, the mess would never have existed. When screaming "death to the infidels!", no one is ever referring to Switzerland. That's probably because they don't screw around in other people's back yards.
I know it's not the one you're looking for, but a buddy of mine has an Atari 2600 plus a stack of games sitting in a closet. He says the controller ports are completely dead. He might be interested in selling it since he's not doing anything with it other than wasting space. On more than one occasion, he's asked me to fix it, but I don't know squat about fixing Ataris. I was a Nintendo kid, myself:-)
Yes, Cal State Berkely? Yes, we did receive the info you've provided. We appreciate your co-operation. There is something else, however. According to your logs, the MAC address for the assigned IP address implicates the Dean. We're going to have to take him into custody. Oh, you'll get his lawyer on the line? Great.
Yes, Mr Very Expensive Lawyer, this is the FBI. Oh, your position is that the MAC address was spoofed? Oh, dang. Well, I suppose we can let the Dean go... THIS time.
That's also assuming that the guy uses his university WiFi. He could always find some nice, open Linksys AP's. In my town, I've found close to 150 open Linksys ones that seem to have all the defaults enabled (default SSID, default chan, so default security settings can be assumed - user:admin, pass:admin), so IF logging is turned on (isn't by default), it can be turned off easily. Hell, these things are everywhere. I've even found a hearing aid store with a wide open AP.
Besides, how easy would it be to track someone if all you knew was the university they attend and their MAC address? You would need the co-operation of each and every student on campus. Good freakin' luck!
Wow, Slashdotters seem to have the sortest memories I've ever encountered. I've seen so many posts with "there is no annonymous e-mail, they all have the IP" that it's scary.
Is everyone forgetting WiFi? My university provides WiFi free to all students. It uses 128-bit encryption, but that's easy enough to crack. There's also (by a conservative count) 300 open hotspots within skating distance of the university (laptop in the backpack finds many wonderful things). If I wanted to send a truly anonymous e-mail, I'd set up a Hotmail account via one of these hotspots, and every time I wanted to check my/send mail, I'd use a different hotspot. For the real paranoid fanatic, drive to different parts of the city each time. It would be damn near impossible to nail me down. The best they could do is "we know what CITY s/he lives in..."
I skate. A LOT. Rollerblading now, but I'm gonna take up boarding one of these days. Street, pipe, vert, whatever. I'm into it all. I have a Samsung Yepp 30SH (128m model) and I listen to it all the time. I generally skate for about 2-3 hours a day (weekdays) with this little beauty going. I would have rather got an iRiver, but it was impossile to get in Canada at the time. I also needed voice recording capabilities for classes. But I must agree, when skiing or snowboarding, the best sounds are what's going on around you. Especially the screams of those around you who don't know what they're doing:-) On the street, though, you get tired of your skates clacking and the pedestrians yelling at you.
Good luck. The RIAA doesn't like to address real concerns, they like to blame the ones they made up. Right now their favorite target is online trading, but this will change. I'm waiting for the day the RIAA takes a firm anti-abortion stance. That fetal tissue was potentially a future consumer! The thoughtless actions of another deprived a lifetime's worth of revenure from that cluster of stem cells. That makes the parents, doctor, nurses, clinics, Jane Roe and the supreme court justices that sat on the bench in 1973 all liable for the hundreds of albums the person-to-be might have otherwise purchased. Sue 'em all!
On my own little rant here, I have a big problem with the term "theft" when referring to file swapping. Theft means that someone has been deprived of something. In the case of file swapping, the label can only argue the loss of potential revenue. When I was shopping for a TV, I was looking at a Panasonic and a Toshiba. Both of these companies had the potential revenue from a TV sale. I was only buying one TV, and I decided to go with the Panasonic in the end. Should Toshiba get all pissy because I deprived them of potential revenue? The proper term the RIAA should be using is "anti-trust". For the record, I don't swap online - I tend to get most of my music from MP3.com and www.fatwreck.com (a great indie punk-rock label). And even then, I tend to buy the CD's of the stuff I really like. That's one great advantage of the type of music I listen to - there's a misc artist collection of punk called "Hopelessly Devoted To You" with MANY volumes. Each one has ~25 tracks, and costs about $5 (taxes in). There's lots of other examples, too. General rule for me: If it ain't worth the scratch to own legit, it ain't worth the drive space. There are a few exceptions, but the RIAA wouldn't be making any money off them anyway (either indie bands or stuff that has been off the market for too long to buy). And to think, I wouldn't have even known there was all this GOOD STUFF out there had it not been for Naptser. Hey, I WAS in high school when it came out, you gotta cut me some slack.
I just saw American Wedding on friday (I'm not gonna give any opinions - I'm not a movie critic). They had one of these commercials just before the previews. This pne "starred" a set designer talking about how much he loves movies, and how he met his wife on the set of The Big Chill, and how "not everybody invloved in the production of a big movie makes 6-figures". and a lot of other stuff to put a human face on the MPAA side ('cuz Jack Valenti isn't human enough). It seems like they pulled out all the stops on this one. "Touching" music (sounds almost like something Williams would do), "artistic" font design, etc. This guy rambles on about how much he loves movies for what seemed like forever before he got to the point. Once he did, it became rather apparent that the plan backfired. The theater was packed (opening night), and several people started laughing openly at this guy say how stealing one copy of a movie online steals his ability to make a living for his family. I heard a guy behind me say to the person next to him that he was going to start pirating movies if this was the "sh*t these assw*pes are gonna make me sit through before they get to the f***ing movie". The person next to him agreed.
Oh, come on. Can you honestly picture Best Buy, Future Shop or any other big box that pays minimum wage forcing employees to have customers read the MS EULA before they fork over the cash? For that matter, can you picutre Dell or Gateway doing it for their phone orders? For the website, sure. That's just one more click. But an in-person purchase requires copies of the EULA to be on hand, and for the customers to READ it. For the phone, the poor bastard taking the order then has to read the EULA to the customer. No retailer/OEM will go to that expense when they can do it the way it's done now.
Right now, they (retailers and OEM's) WANT to do it this way because very few people will bother with the refund. If the customer is forced to agree before the purchase, they are afraid that the customer will be upset that they must agree to a contract restricting the way they use the computer before they buy. Your post leads me to believe that you are forgetting that most computer buyers don't even know what slashdot is. These people will agree to the EULA after purchase, but will start to get suspicious if they have to sign before they buy.
$199 because at the time of purchase, that was the retail cost of WinXP (whatever version he got, be it Pro or Home). That was all he had to prove. After that, it was the defendant's job to prove the actual cost was something different. Since they didn't show, they couldn't do that.
Second, OEM's are not forced to ship a computer with Wondows by MS anymore (by law).
You're absolutely right. When MS was forcing OEM's to ship Windows, the EULA was not presented and agreed to by the end user BEFORE the purchase, rendering it null and void. Essentially, the end user was allowed to do anything allowed by law that the EULA would otherwise curb. It would be like if you leased a car. The dealer still owns it, they just let you drive it for a certain period of time. But after you pay the dealer (deposit, first month, etc), you are then presented with a contract that says when and where you are allowed to drive the car, or what gas stations you are allowed to frequent. If you don't agree the contract, tough. Can't drive the car. Sucks to be you. Maybe you would have agreed had the dealer presented the contract before you paid, maybe not. The legal problem comes down to that, while the dealer still owns the car, they agreed to let you drive it for the conditions presented BEFORE you paid. They added conditions after the transaction, with no recourse if you did not like the added conditions.
Same with Windows. You bought it without reading the EULA - it wasn't even presented to you. Any conditions added after the purchase are null and void unless you have a way of getting a refund if you do not agree to the added conditions. Basically, MS was pulling a yoink, and the courts didn't like it. MS was told that they have the right to limit the use of their software, but the consumer has a right to know what limits were in place BEFORE they buy. And if they (the consumer) didn't have a way of agreeing to the EULA contract before they purchased, they have to have a way of getting their money back if they don't like the conditions. Without that recourse, the entire EULA is rendered null and void since it is an attempt to change the deal after the fact, so to speak.
In your example, you talk about returning the back seat for a partial refund. That would work only if you did not know the car came with a back seat before you purchased (good luck proving that), and the dealer "snuck it in" after you paid.
You don't have to worry about DMCA-style laws up here. Check out here for why. Basically, we have bill C-6 (The Privacy Act) and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act to protect us. To boil it down, when the last stages of these laws come in to effect in jan2004, any non-journalistic/artistic business has to have a court order signed by a judge (not just a stamp from a clerk) to release any information about an identifiable person. So if an (RI|MP)AA-type organization sends just a subpoena to your ISP, your ISP is then supposed to tell them to go screw themselves. Gotta love it!
When this thing is offered in the USA with Macrovision disabled
There's already DVD players you can buy in North America with Macrovision disabled - region free, too. Most Apex Digital DVD players are hackable or have hidden menues built in to disable Macrovision. I bought an AD-3201
in about oct2001 from Future Shop (yes, I live in Canada). Completely un-modded, you could change the region code and disable Macrovision from a hidden menu (if you have an AD-3201 - while the disc tray is open, press '8421' on the remote to access the menu). The Apex remotes really suck, but a universal solved that problem.
The scariest part is that she was. At least according to her Wired interview - she made it sound like she was the lone voice of reason. I remember her saying she tried to convince them (the real power holders in the RIAA) that they won't be able to end file sharing through legal means or DRM, and that they will have to embrace the future (easy & cheap digital distrobution) if they don't want to go under. I also seem to remember her saying she has an iPod loaded with mp3's.
Not that I'm defending all those PR statements she made, or anything like that.
I thought that the language believed to be Chinese (in North American) was actually two different languages - Mandarin and Cantonese. Anyone here know for sure?
They would have a hard time enforcing any such claims. They never paid me, and never even asked me to make it. I did it on my own time, on my own equpiment, for my own use. It was only after it was done that I was asked if they could use it. They'll also have a REALLY hard time claiming they own it because of them owning the systems, or such. The source code is on my systems entirely, and backed up at home. I never put it on work machines because I don't have access to a compiler at work. Plus, I put in an Easter Egg that only I know about (so far), so that may come in handy.
Besides, I only have to take legal action if they try to infringe on the copyrights. They haven't done that yet.
That's the best part - they never paid me to make this program, I just did it on my own personal time (breaks, lunch, hometime, etc) just to make my job easier (using my laptop and my compliers and such). I showed my boss to ask her who I would need approval for to use it, and it's now been implimented for everyone who does my job. I never signed any forms. In fact, the closest thing to a formal agreement was "Do you mind if we put this on everyone's system?" - I don't mind everyone using it at all.
Sweet Jeebuz, I just had a vision of an amusment park with armed security guards shooting people who didn't have a hand stamp.
Or even the actors - imagine Mickey and Goofy boot-stomping some kid pinned in a corner just because he wandered into Epcot Center looking for his parents when his pass was only good for Magic Kingdom....
Why not? He makes some good points. Overall, just because you run a company (or a consortium) doesn't mean you know jack squat about tech. Hell, I've met some of the high-up execs from one of the larger telcos in Canada, and once they found out I was a comp geek, they asked the standard "Future Shop/Circut City first time computer buyer" questions. These were people with LOADS of education and market experience (each of them had an MBA, and 2 of them even had doctorate degrees). They knew how to run a sucessful company. They did it very well. They still do. But these people sunk untold millions over the past 5-7 years on an interactive video project that was doomed from the start. They wanted to stream high-quality video, in real time, over phone lines. Their analysts told them it was possible because of all the money they spent on laying fibre all over the place, but the analysts left out a few key things (like all research firms do, because they want future contracts and telling the execs that the latest toy they want is impossible in current markets. That and research firms don't know everything - they just pretend they do). Like even though all houses have fiber up to the phone box in the basement, everyone still has standard copper lines in their house. And DVD-quality video takes HUGE bandwith - even fibre will choke when the market is still a long way from saturation. And the required horsepower on the server end. Basically, they left out a lot of "details". So the execs (the same MBA-having ones) went forward, and just rolled out the the system recently (in the last 6 months or so). Basically, the system worked okay in the first couple of weeks (still video and sound quality problems, but still acceptable). Once people started signing up, the system started to colapse. It's to the point where the techs installing the boxes have started telling customers not to bother. I know 2 different people who had 2 different installers tell them to return the unit and get a dish.
Moral of the story: The leprechaun that tels you to burn things is a liar, but he still speaks some truth.
Wait, that's not it. Just because they are executives running companies doesn't mean they don't do boneheaded things. Stupidity is an exponetial equation - the stupidity level increases greatly as more stupid people are added.
If you are employed then your work belongs to your employer.
I guess I'm REALLY lucky. I (sort of) do creative work, but I NEVER signed any contract saying that I handed rights over to my employer. In my line of work, I was never expected to do any creative/design work - they just found out I had programming skills after I had a no-brainer job, and occasionally ask me to do some custom stuff. Nothing to heavy, but I still own the rights (I program everything on my own personal laptop). I also put copywight notices in everything. Go me!
That's one thing I never understood. By assuming that by "God", he was referring to a "Great Creator", that leaves the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord possibilities. What if by "God", He was thinking more along the lines of Nietzsche's Ubermensch? By that, I mean someone who, either via nature/nurture (that's an argument I want to avoid...) was "elevated" above the rest of us? Maybe he had mental disciplines and insight so advanced that those around him started to see him as devine in nature. Maybe he was just a great philosopher and pacifist who just didn't explain himself well enough to those around him. I'm not saying that I believe one way or the other, I'm just saying that the Bible does not validate itself.
BTW, that holds true for ALL documents. Just because Tom Clancy puts "Based on a true story" at the beginning of a book doesn't mean it actually happend (I don't know if he ever has, I don't read Tom Clancy). Again, I'm not saying the Bible is complete fiction, but you can't take a book at face value just because said book tells the reader that everything in it is true.
wait, what was that address? *scribble* www.thehun.org.... got it. dammit, anyone remember the bookmark shortcut on mozilla? blood just rushed from my brain, made me forget
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget, she's not just a nuclear physicist, she's also a quantum biologist.
Jebus H Christ, man! Have you seen my parents?!? I don't want to think of my conception AT ALL! I like to think that I was unceremoniously dropped down the chimney by a big, hairy pterodactyl.
The US has a history of this shit. Look at Noriega. The man was a CIA operative since 1966, and put in power through drug running, assasination and elections rigging. Those CIA boys sure are helpful, ain't they? They ignored the mass slaughter Noriega conducted until he stopped reporting to them. After that, he HAD to be taken down for the good of the people of Panama! Sound familliar?
Remember, the CIA also trained the Taliban and a young Osama bin Laden. There was money and weapons provided so they could "fight the opressors" (the USSR at the time). Never mind that the USSR had no interest in Afghanistan until the USA started supporting the small and inoffensive country. This support was provided expressley to provoke a USSR invasion (if the USA wants to help them so badly, we must destroy them!). After the Soviets were driven out, the CIA put the Taliban in place. We should all remember how that ended.
People wonder why there is so much hatred towards the USA. It's because the government is so power hungry they just have to "play" in other coutries to wrestle just a little more control. They can't mind their own damn business. I'm not saying they shouldn't clean up a few things (like Saddam), but if the US didn't stick it's nose where it didn't belong in the first place, the mess would never have existed. When screaming "death to the infidels!", no one is ever referring to Switzerland. That's probably because they don't screw around in other people's back yards.
I know it's not the one you're looking for, but a buddy of mine has an Atari 2600 plus a stack of games sitting in a closet. He says the controller ports are completely dead. He might be interested in selling it since he's not doing anything with it other than wasting space. On more than one occasion, he's asked me to fix it, but I don't know squat about fixing Ataris. I was a Nintendo kid, myself :-)
Yes, Cal State Berkely? Yes, we did receive the info you've provided. We appreciate your co-operation. There is something else, however. According to your logs, the MAC address for the assigned IP address implicates the Dean. We're going to have to take him into custody. Oh, you'll get his lawyer on the line? Great.
Yes, Mr Very Expensive Lawyer, this is the FBI. Oh, your position is that the MAC address was spoofed? Oh, dang. Well, I suppose we can let the Dean go... THIS time.
That's also assuming that the guy uses his university WiFi. He could always find some nice, open Linksys AP's. In my town, I've found close to 150 open Linksys ones that seem to have all the defaults enabled (default SSID, default chan, so default security settings can be assumed - user:admin, pass:admin), so IF logging is turned on (isn't by default), it can be turned off easily. Hell, these things are everywhere. I've even found a hearing aid store with a wide open AP.
Besides, how easy would it be to track someone if all you knew was the university they attend and their MAC address? You would need the co-operation of each and every student on campus. Good freakin' luck!
Wow, Slashdotters seem to have the sortest memories I've ever encountered. I've seen so many posts with "there is no annonymous e-mail, they all have the IP" that it's scary.
Is everyone forgetting WiFi? My university provides WiFi free to all students. It uses 128-bit encryption, but that's easy enough to crack. There's also (by a conservative count) 300 open hotspots within skating distance of the university (laptop in the backpack finds many wonderful things). If I wanted to send a truly anonymous e-mail, I'd set up a Hotmail account via one of these hotspots, and every time I wanted to check my/send mail, I'd use a different hotspot. For the real paranoid fanatic, drive to different parts of the city each time. It would be damn near impossible to nail me down. The best they could do is "we know what CITY s/he lives in..."
This has actually been around for a while. I remember reading a review for it on IGN.com before they started charging for premium content.
I skate. A LOT. Rollerblading now, but I'm gonna take up boarding one of these days. Street, pipe, vert, whatever. I'm into it all. I have a Samsung Yepp 30SH (128m model) and I listen to it all the time. I generally skate for about 2-3 hours a day (weekdays) with this little beauty going. I would have rather got an iRiver, but it was impossile to get in Canada at the time. I also needed voice recording capabilities for classes. But I must agree, when skiing or snowboarding, the best sounds are what's going on around you. Especially the screams of those around you who don't know what they're doing:-) On the street, though, you get tired of your skates clacking and the pedestrians yelling at you.
Good luck. The RIAA doesn't like to address real concerns, they like to blame the ones they made up. Right now their favorite target is online trading, but this will change. I'm waiting for the day the RIAA takes a firm anti-abortion stance. That fetal tissue was potentially a future consumer! The thoughtless actions of another deprived a lifetime's worth of revenure from that cluster of stem cells. That makes the parents, doctor, nurses, clinics, Jane Roe and the supreme court justices that sat on the bench in 1973 all liable for the hundreds of albums the person-to-be might have otherwise purchased. Sue 'em all!
On my own little rant here, I have a big problem with the term "theft" when referring to file swapping. Theft means that someone has been deprived of something. In the case of file swapping, the label can only argue the loss of potential revenue. When I was shopping for a TV, I was looking at a Panasonic and a Toshiba. Both of these companies had the potential revenue from a TV sale. I was only buying one TV, and I decided to go with the Panasonic in the end. Should Toshiba get all pissy because I deprived them of potential revenue? The proper term the RIAA should be using is "anti-trust". For the record, I don't swap online - I tend to get most of my music from MP3.com and www.fatwreck.com (a great indie punk-rock label). And even then, I tend to buy the CD's of the stuff I really like. That's one great advantage of the type of music I listen to - there's a misc artist collection of punk called "Hopelessly Devoted To You" with MANY volumes. Each one has ~25 tracks, and costs about $5 (taxes in). There's lots of other examples, too. General rule for me: If it ain't worth the scratch to own legit, it ain't worth the drive space. There are a few exceptions, but the RIAA wouldn't be making any money off them anyway (either indie bands or stuff that has been off the market for too long to buy). And to think, I wouldn't have even known there was all this GOOD STUFF out there had it not been for Naptser. Hey, I WAS in high school when it came out, you gotta cut me some slack.
I just saw American Wedding on friday (I'm not gonna give any opinions - I'm not a movie critic). They had one of these commercials just before the previews. This pne "starred" a set designer talking about how much he loves movies, and how he met his wife on the set of The Big Chill, and how "not everybody invloved in the production of a big movie makes 6-figures". and a lot of other stuff to put a human face on the MPAA side ('cuz Jack Valenti isn't human enough). It seems like they pulled out all the stops on this one. "Touching" music (sounds almost like something Williams would do), "artistic" font design, etc. This guy rambles on about how much he loves movies for what seemed like forever before he got to the point. Once he did, it became rather apparent that the plan backfired. The theater was packed (opening night), and several people started laughing openly at this guy say how stealing one copy of a movie online steals his ability to make a living for his family. I heard a guy behind me say to the person next to him that he was going to start pirating movies if this was the "sh*t these assw*pes are gonna make me sit through before they get to the f***ing movie". The person next to him agreed.
Right now, they (retailers and OEM's) WANT to do it this way because very few people will bother with the refund. If the customer is forced to agree before the purchase, they are afraid that the customer will be upset that they must agree to a contract restricting the way they use the computer before they buy. Your post leads me to believe that you are forgetting that most computer buyers don't even know what slashdot is. These people will agree to the EULA after purchase, but will start to get suspicious if they have to sign before they buy.
$199 because at the time of purchase, that was the retail cost of WinXP (whatever version he got, be it Pro or Home). That was all he had to prove. After that, it was the defendant's job to prove the actual cost was something different. Since they didn't show, they couldn't do that.
Second, OEM's are not forced to ship a computer with Wondows by MS anymore (by law).
You're absolutely right. When MS was forcing OEM's to ship Windows, the EULA was not presented and agreed to by the end user BEFORE the purchase, rendering it null and void. Essentially, the end user was allowed to do anything allowed by law that the EULA would otherwise curb. It would be like if you leased a car. The dealer still owns it, they just let you drive it for a certain period of time. But after you pay the dealer (deposit, first month, etc), you are then presented with a contract that says when and where you are allowed to drive the car, or what gas stations you are allowed to frequent. If you don't agree the contract, tough. Can't drive the car. Sucks to be you. Maybe you would have agreed had the dealer presented the contract before you paid, maybe not. The legal problem comes down to that, while the dealer still owns the car, they agreed to let you drive it for the conditions presented BEFORE you paid. They added conditions after the transaction, with no recourse if you did not like the added conditions.
Same with Windows. You bought it without reading the EULA - it wasn't even presented to you. Any conditions added after the purchase are null and void unless you have a way of getting a refund if you do not agree to the added conditions. Basically, MS was pulling a yoink, and the courts didn't like it. MS was told that they have the right to limit the use of their software, but the consumer has a right to know what limits were in place BEFORE they buy. And if they (the consumer) didn't have a way of agreeing to the EULA contract before they purchased, they have to have a way of getting their money back if they don't like the conditions. Without that recourse, the entire EULA is rendered null and void since it is an attempt to change the deal after the fact, so to speak.
In your example, you talk about returning the back seat for a partial refund. That would work only if you did not know the car came with a back seat before you purchased (good luck proving that), and the dealer "snuck it in" after you paid.
Say what you want about Trudeau -- love 'im, hate 'im, whatever -- every Canadian must agree - he certainly made things INTERESTING.
You don't have to worry about DMCA-style laws up here. Check out here for why. Basically, we have bill C-6 (The Privacy Act) and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act to protect us. To boil it down, when the last stages of these laws come in to effect in jan2004, any non-journalistic/artistic business has to have a court order signed by a judge (not just a stamp from a clerk) to release any information about an identifiable person. So if an (RI|MP)AA-type organization sends just a subpoena to your ISP, your ISP is then supposed to tell them to go screw themselves. Gotta love it!
There's already DVD players you can buy in North America with Macrovision disabled - region free, too. Most Apex Digital DVD players are hackable or have hidden menues built in to disable Macrovision. I bought an AD-3201 in about oct2001 from Future Shop (yes, I live in Canada). Completely un-modded, you could change the region code and disable Macrovision from a hidden menu (if you have an AD-3201 - while the disc tray is open, press '8421' on the remote to access the menu). The Apex remotes really suck, but a universal solved that problem.
The get to continue existing
Not that I'm defending all those PR statements she made, or anything like that.
Either way, I think he was joking.
Besides, I only have to take legal action if they try to infringe on the copyrights. They haven't done that yet.
I even bought the laptop before I got this job
Or even the actors - imagine Mickey and Goofy boot-stomping some kid pinned in a corner just because he wandered into Epcot Center looking for his parents when his pass was only good for Magic Kingdom....
Moral of the story: The leprechaun that tels you to burn things is a liar, but he still speaks some truth.
Wait, that's not it. Just because they are executives running companies doesn't mean they don't do boneheaded things. Stupidity is an exponetial equation - the stupidity level increases greatly as more stupid people are added.
I guess I'm REALLY lucky. I (sort of) do creative work, but I NEVER signed any contract saying that I handed rights over to my employer. In my line of work, I was never expected to do any creative/design work - they just found out I had programming skills after I had a no-brainer job, and occasionally ask me to do some custom stuff. Nothing to heavy, but I still own the rights (I program everything on my own personal laptop). I also put copywight notices in everything. Go me!
BTW, that holds true for ALL documents. Just because Tom Clancy puts "Based on a true story" at the beginning of a book doesn't mean it actually happend (I don't know if he ever has, I don't read Tom Clancy). Again, I'm not saying the Bible is complete fiction, but you can't take a book at face value just because said book tells the reader that everything in it is true.
wait, what was that address? *scribble* www.thehun.org.... got it. dammit, anyone remember the bookmark shortcut on mozilla? blood just rushed from my brain, made me forget