The BSA's argument is, I think, that the Certificate of Authenticity shows you have a license, but does not show that you had it as of the date they sent you a letter saying they wanted to audit you. So they pretty much just ignore it.
Don't forget the reduction in personnel surfing the web all day.
Nearly every time I walk up to the front of the building, someone is sitting there surfing the web instead of working. I think that using dumb terminals could easily improve our productivity by at least 10 percent.
I already use a dumb terminal on my desk in addition to several computers and associated monitors. I can log into a computer and use the screen ("screen manager with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation") program to maintain multiple windows. It's not all that different from using ratpoision directly on my development BSD machines.
The question isn't what a jury is going to find. It is what the BSA considers acceptable to keep them from taking you to court for software piracy. They know that the enormous litigation costs means that few, if any, cases will ever see a jury.
Copies of Checks to Software Vendors
Dated Purchase Orders
Undated Software Licenses
Credit Card Statements Evidencing Software Purchases
Certificates of Authenticity Media, Manuals, or Key-Codes Invoices Bearing and Entity Name Other than the Entity Named in the BSA's Initial Letter
Valid Proof of Purchase
Dated Invoices in the Name of the Audited Entity Soft Records (online account statements) from Recognized Resellers
Signed and Dated License Agreements
Soft Records from BSA Member's such as Microsoft Licensing Statements
Cash Register Receipts for Retail Sales where Product, Version, Quantity and Price Paid are Included.
They know that when you balance paying them off with the legal fees involved in proving your case in court, you are going to pay them off just to get rid of them.
All they need is a minimal reason to justify their lawsuit. The wrong name on the invoices can easily provide the minimal reason they need.
Having disks, license keys, and boxes on site apparently isn't enough.
According to some reports, the BSA reportedly requires original invoices dated before notice of the audit and showing the company name exactly. Supposedly, if you change the name of the company, you have to buy a whole new set of licenses and have the original invoices to prove it.
That is one of the best reasons of all to ditch Microsoft for good.
I think they buy an annuity payable to the winner over the next 25 years or so. The cash option is the amount that would go to buy the annuity if you had selected annual payments.
The state doesn't make those annual payments to you, the purchaser of the annuity, I assume an insurance company, makes those payments.
So what happens in the lottery has no effect. But if the insurance company goes under, there goes your annual payments.
All it does is replace the opportunity for a well reasoned explanation of why it won't work with a simplistic clutter that imparts no wisdom, useful or otherwise, at all.
Solar water-heaters on the other hand are beneficial. Especially if you live in an area with plenty of sun *and* have a large family that likes to frequently shower in the summer, it can be a huge win. There are substantial savings from installing them at the same time one installs roofing, so your best bet is probably going to be to install them at the same time your roofing needs replacement anyway, rather than separately.
Years ago, my grandfather had a steel drum painted black on the roof of the well house. They would fill it up with water in the morning and it would be nice and warm by the end of the day when they got home from the field. So that was what they used to bathe/shower. Of course, that was before they had hot water heaters so the alternative was to heat water on a stove.
One neighbor reportedly had problems with this approach. It was his wife's job to fill the drum with water. When she was pissed off about something, apparently a common occurrence, she'd wait until an hour before they were due in from the field to fill it with water.
If a copyright owner, or his agent, made his own works available for download, wouldn't that show it to be all right with him for everyone to download them?
Otherwise, it would be like arguing that even though they were distributing the work, they weren't really distributing the work. And that makes no sense at all.
They can only prosecute the child predators when the predator goes to meet with the child.
My understanding is that in Texas, arranging to meet someone for sex who you believe to be under the age of consent is a crime in itself whether or not you actually show up.
I always test everything in detail as I write it. A good tester would be left with checking for something I missed, but that wouldn't take a full time tester.
At one time, I had a tester assigned to me half time. That was when I was given someone else's code to fix. That was the worst code I've seen outside of a classroom. The writer, for some bizarre reason, had been promoted to project manager in spite of the fact that he had only been a software developer for a couple of years or so. Prior to that, he was an insurance salesman!
I asked time and time again to let me rewrite the application instead of the useless task of fixing it. Instead, they assigned a tester to find bugs for me to fix and hinted that if I didn't get the code polished, they would fire me. He had no problem finding bugs but I had already seen the futility of trying to fix them.
I left a short time later for a new job. The task was handed over to a guy in the office next to mine who went hog wild fixing bugs for a week or two before realizing that it just didn't matter. Instead of asking permission as I had done to rewrite it, he just did it on his own. When someone would holler for a bug fix, he'd fix that bug for them and then get back to work on rewriting it.
About the time he finished the application, the project had been sold to the company for which we were developing the code. They had been sitting in on our meetings for a while and so one of the first things that company did was replace the project manager with someone who knew what he was doing. So when the other guy showed off the new code, instead of getting fired for insubordination, everyone thought it was great.
In short, the one time I had a tester assigned to me, I didn't want a tester. I wanted to start over. The rest of the time, I've had to beg to get anyone to test the code instead of just using it for its intended purpose.
If I see a clause like that on the user agreement, my first question is going to be "and so, just how do you intend to jerk me around? that you have that clause there?"
That is precisely what I thought the one time I came across such a term. I figured that if they were putting that in their terms and conditions, then they must have a problem with people disputing charges and that, more than likely, they were disputed for very good reason.
I remember reading an article in about 1992 or so in which Bill Gates compared measuring programming productivity to measuring progress in building aircraft by how much weight was added to the aircraft.
Every year, we usually get a winter jacket and a sweater.
This year, nothing.
It turned out that the employee who was supposed to take care of ordering them didn't order anything and didn't tell anyone about it. The first the president of the company knew about it was at the Christmas party.
So on Friday, a couple of people sat down and did the ordering for the women up front. I don't think the men are going to get anything at all.
I have more coats than I need. But it will still bother me if only the women here get anything at all.
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The BSA's argument is, I think, that the Certificate of Authenticity shows you have a license, but does not show that you had it as of the date they sent you a letter saying they wanted to audit you. So they pretty much just ignore it.
Don't forget the reduction in personnel surfing the web all day.
Nearly every time I walk up to the front of the building, someone is sitting there surfing the web instead of working. I think that using dumb terminals could easily improve our productivity by at least 10 percent.
I already use a dumb terminal on my desk in addition to several computers and associated monitors. I can log into a computer and use the screen ("screen manager with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation") program to maintain multiple windows. It's not all that different from using ratpoision directly on my development BSD machines.
The question isn't what a jury is going to find. It is what the BSA considers acceptable to keep them from taking you to court for software piracy. They know that the enormous litigation costs means that few, if any, cases will ever see a jury.
From Proof of License in BSA Audits:
You are entirely correct.
They know that when you balance paying them off with the legal fees involved in proving your case in court, you are going to pay them off just to get rid of them.
All they need is a minimal reason to justify their lawsuit. The wrong name on the invoices can easily provide the minimal reason they need.
According to some reports, the BSA reportedly requires original invoices dated before notice of the audit and showing the company name exactly. Supposedly, if you change the name of the company, you have to buy a whole new set of licenses and have the original invoices to prove it.
That is one of the best reasons of all to ditch Microsoft for good.
I think they buy an annuity payable to the winner over the next 25 years or so. The cash option is the amount that would go to buy the annuity if you had selected annual payments.
The state doesn't make those annual payments to you, the purchaser of the annuity, I assume an insurance company, makes those payments.
So what happens in the lottery has no effect. But if the insurance company goes under, there goes your annual payments.
All it does is replace the opportunity for a well reasoned explanation of why it won't work with a simplistic clutter that imparts no wisdom, useful or otherwise, at all.
Years ago, my grandfather had a steel drum painted black on the roof of the well house. They would fill it up with water in the morning and it would be nice and warm by the end of the day when they got home from the field. So that was what they used to bathe/shower. Of course, that was before they had hot water heaters so the alternative was to heat water on a stove.
One neighbor reportedly had problems with this approach. It was his wife's job to fill the drum with water. When she was pissed off about something, apparently a common occurrence, she'd wait until an hour before they were due in from the field to fill it with water.
We just need IPv6.
You could change the IP address each day and never repeat an IP address even after several years.
The first time I ever saw one of those "forms", I thought it was interesting.
The second time, I thought it was "ho-hum".
After hundreds, maybe even thousands, they are just plain lame.
The only good thing about them is that you instantly know that you can skip over them and not miss anything at all.
In the winter, I eat a grapefruit almost every morning sometime between 4 am and 6 am.
If a copyright owner, or his agent, made his own works available for download, wouldn't that show it to be all right with him for everyone to download them?
Otherwise, it would be like arguing that even though they were distributing the work, they weren't really distributing the work. And that makes no sense at all.
I'm firmly of the opinion that an independent inventor should be able to use the idea even though he is not the original inventor.
After all, if it is easy enough to come up with the idea with no knowledge of the original invention, it really can't be all that non-obvious.
And if an inventor is not using his invention, he should not be able to enforce the patent against anyone.
10 layer DVDs from Ritek?
When I've seen lists of various qualities of CDs, Ritek was usually near the bottom.
I wonder how they rank on DVDs. I've used Ritek DVD+RW and never had more problems with them than other DVD+RW media.
My understanding is that in Texas, arranging to meet someone for sex who you believe to be under the age of consent is a crime in itself whether or not you actually show up.
Yeah, but what can they really do with the IPs they collect? Is "attempted copyright infringement" a crime?
I always test everything in detail as I write it. A good tester would be left with checking for something I missed, but that wouldn't take a full time tester.
At one time, I had a tester assigned to me half time. That was when I was given someone else's code to fix. That was the worst code I've seen outside of a classroom. The writer, for some bizarre reason, had been promoted to project manager in spite of the fact that he had only been a software developer for a couple of years or so. Prior to that, he was an insurance salesman!
I asked time and time again to let me rewrite the application instead of the useless task of fixing it. Instead, they assigned a tester to find bugs for me to fix and hinted that if I didn't get the code polished, they would fire me. He had no problem finding bugs but I had already seen the futility of trying to fix them.
I left a short time later for a new job. The task was handed over to a guy in the office next to mine who went hog wild fixing bugs for a week or two before realizing that it just didn't matter. Instead of asking permission as I had done to rewrite it, he just did it on his own. When someone would holler for a bug fix, he'd fix that bug for them and then get back to work on rewriting it.
About the time he finished the application, the project had been sold to the company for which we were developing the code. They had been sitting in on our meetings for a while and so one of the first things that company did was replace the project manager with someone who knew what he was doing. So when the other guy showed off the new code, instead of getting fired for insubordination, everyone thought it was great.
In short, the one time I had a tester assigned to me, I didn't want a tester. I wanted to start over. The rest of the time, I've had to beg to get anyone to test the code instead of just using it for its intended purpose.
So eBay would own x.xxx?
That is precisely what I thought the one time I came across such a term. I figured that if they were putting that in their terms and conditions, then they must have a problem with people disputing charges and that, more than likely, they were disputed for very good reason.
More importantly, U.S. Copyright law explicitly permit public libraries to do what they are doing.
Regardless of the RIAA's opinon, they can't do diddlysquat about it short of paying off Congress to change the law.
Copyright violations aren't theft.
Theft implies that you took something from someone else resulting in their loss of the use of the item.
For example, if you steal my car, you have deprived me of the use of that car.
I remember reading an article in about 1992 or so in which Bill Gates compared measuring programming productivity to measuring progress in building aircraft by how much weight was added to the aircraft.
Where I live, we don't have traffic jams.
In a community of about 70 people covering 50 square miles, it's not hard to imagine why traffic jams are nonexistent.
I used to live in Houston. After years of moving back here, I've nearly forgotten what traffic jams are like.
Around here, the closest thing to a traffic jam is me. Even the old people think I drive too slow.
Every year, we usually get a winter jacket and a sweater.
This year, nothing.
It turned out that the employee who was supposed to take care of ordering them didn't order anything and didn't tell anyone about it. The first the president of the company knew about it was at the Christmas party.
So on Friday, a couple of people sat down and did the ordering for the women up front. I don't think the men are going to get anything at all.
I have more coats than I need. But it will still bother me if only the women here get anything at all.
How about Harry Potter and the Deathly Vole?