What immorality are we talking about here? What illegality here?
It is immoral for Apple to tell me what to do with my property (i.e., a copy of OS X that I buy at retail). The only thing that Apple (or any software maker) should be justified in getting upset about me doing is committing copyright infringement. I should be able to run OS X on a PC. I should be able to benchmark Oracle. I should be able to use my AOL CD as a coaster! And neither AOL, Oracle, or Apple should be able to do anything what-so-fucking-ever about it, because it's my property!
EULAs are an affront to private ownership of property, because they make the rightful, legal owner of the property beholden to some third party for no good reason. They are, quite literally, fascist and contrary to the principles upon which this country (assuming you, like me, are from the US) was founded. That's why they're immoral and ought to be illegal, thankyouverymuch!
In this case PsyStar is both installing OS X AND distributing the copy they installed.
That installed copy is nothing more than an incidental consequence of the medium (i.e., that software has to be installed to be used). As long as the install media is sold along with it, it doesn't count as a separate copy.
distribution of copyrighted code is copyright infringement
No, distribution of unauthorized copies of copyrighted code to different people is copyright infringement. What Psystar is doing is nothing more than reselling the original copy (and, incidentally, format-shifting it as a convenience to the buyer).
The actual wording says you can only install it on a macintosh computer. that's the catch.
Nope, it says "Apple-labeled," not "Macintosh." You could install OS X on an Apple II (if you could get it to run) and still comply with the EULA.
Of course, "Apple labeled" is a stupid term: as far as I'm concerned, if I stuck an Apple sticker (a couple of them come with OS X, by the way) on my Thinkpad then I think it ought to qualify!
You can't really force a company to sell a product.
You're completely right: Apple would certainly be free to stop selling OS X, including the copies installed on Macs, if it wanted. But if it wanted to be allowed to continue putting OS X on Macs, then it could very well be forced to sell it for non-Macs too.
On the other hand, if they're going to be jerks towards their customers, people are also not obligated to continue patronizing them.
But if they're the only service provider, then people are obligated to continue patronizing them. Contrapositively, they are then obligated not to be jerks. QED.
WTF? The plan jumps to 1 GB from 8 megabytes?! It's fucking absurd that telecoms are allowed to get away with completely fucking over everyone who wants reasonable service at a price point lower than the most expensive plan like this!
(And no, the 1GB plan is not a reasonable change from unlimited... but the "connect 25" and "connect 40" plans are even worse!)
It doesn't matter: you can't tell very well from the picture, but it's much taller than all the trees around it (which are full-size, by the way). It would stick out no matter how well they disguised it.
[I]t seems like it's there so that you can be called upon to defend the country, not to overthrow the government.
No, it's there so that you can be called upon to defend the country full stop. It says nothing about not overthrowing the government. This is an important distinction, because sometimes "defending the country" and "overthrowing the government" are the same thing.
I'm not sure, but I think Jefferson might just have had some personal experience with that kind of situation...
What I'm saying that the general population when told a scientific principle and simply believes it to be true without understanding the science that was used to create that principle, has no hope of an understanding on how to prove that principle (and this I'd guess is 90%+ of the population) simply believes that principle to be true without proof. This is the same as faith.
Yes, I realize that, and you're still wrong. Faith is not simply believing something without proof, it is believing something without the possibility of proof or in the face of disproof.
Here are some examples:
I believe that there is life elsewhere in our galaxy. This is not faith, because its existence could theoretically be proven or disproven within the constraints of the laws of physics (It would take a vastly impractical amount of time and effort, but it could be done).
Some people believe in god(s). This is faith, because science is fundamentally not capable of deciding it.
Some people believe in young-earth creationism, despite the fact that things like radio-carbon dating have disproven it (they either come up with flawed pseudo-scientific arguments about it or rationalize that god is testing their faith by making it seem as if its not true). This is likewise faith, not mere normal belief.
Exactly, with tiered pricing, most people would pay less than they do now with the current pricing scheme.
This is demonstratively false. There has never been a single instance in history where Comcast has ever lowered its prices. In reality, tiered pricing would mean that the light users pay exactly the same amount as before, heavy users (and moderate users!) pay more, and Comcast gets an increase in profits.
Back when I first got broadband in 1998, it was 768k per second. Now I get 16/2 for $52.95 per month.
And what about those of us -- the vast majority of us, I'd wager -- who want something like 768k for $10/month instead of 16M for $50? The monopoly completely screws us over! Sure, in theory you could get something like this with DSL, but by the time you pay for a phone line (or the BS charge for "naked" DSL) you're back up to $40/month anyway.
I'm not saying that science and religion are equivalent, but that faith in scientific principles and faith in a higher power are essentially the same thing.
But they're not the same thing. In fact, "faith in scientific principles" is a nonsensical statement: the only fundamental scientific principle is the Scientific Method itself, and the Scientific Method does not require faith.
Even the axioms all the rest of science is built upon don't require faith; they're nothing more than the guesses that, as far as we can tell, come closest to matching the observable reality. The only "faith" involved would be if you continued to believe an axiom or principle after it was disproved (e.g. the Earth-centric universe after Galileo), and that's obviously the opposite of science.
It is enough for someone in supposed authority to simply say something and most will take it at face value. Is this not faith? And if they did look it up to 'prove' it (ignoring the fact that most the vast majority would not understand the science anyway), is this not the same as looking up something a priest says in the bible?
That proves that people are idiots, not that science and religion are equivalent.
Laughable really, and while most people take that as truth, almost no layman can say exactly how that happens. They were just told that it does and they believe it. Is religion any different?
Yes, religion is different in one very important way: it requires faith. In contrast, believing that the sun's energy causes your body to form vitamin D (which, by the way, is a much fairer way to describe it than the phrase you used) does not require faith, because we know that we could look up the proof if we cared to expend the effort.
In other words, scientific facts are provable. Even if we do not demand that proof, it still exists. Religion, on the other hand, is not provable. (And that's by definition: if it were provable, it wouldn't be religion anymore.)
Secondly, nVidia are a major producer of chipsets for Intel, and a lawsuit could see them dump support for Intel (and either solely support AMD or leave the chipset business altogether).
That would hurt nVidia much more than it would hurt Intel.
Here, you're assuming that each and every person, when finished voting will then wait for, pick up, and meticulously verify an additional printout and no one will ignore it, drop it, crumple it up, put it in their pocket, or whatever. Um... yeah. Good luck with that.
If the voter is that fucking stupid, then why would we care about his vote anyway?! I mean yeah, literacy tests and whatnot are illegal (and rightly so), but it's certainly not discriminatory to expect people to be able to follow a set of simple, reasonable directions!
In this scenario, all you've done is used a great big, shiny, expensive computer to replace a #2 pencil. And, you've introduced an unnecessary level of indirection. With a fill-in-the-oval paper ballot, the ballot is the piece of paper that the voter interacted with and wrote on. With your scenario, the paper ballot is a secondary artifact that should (but might not) match what the voter intended when he or she touched the fancy-looking touch screen.
First of all, fill-in-the-oval ballots would have their share of failure modes too. Haven't you ever heard of someone taking a multiple-choice test and failing horribly because they skipped an answer and then put all the answers subsequent to that one row above the one they should have gone in? What if they use the wrong kind of pencil (or a pen)? What if they fill in half a bubble? What if they fill in two bubbles? What if they write an X over the choice they want instead of filling in the bubble? Now, my answer for all these situations would of course be the same as above: throw out the incompetent dumbass's vote. But the rate of incompetency, I believe, would be far higher with fill-in-the-oval ballots than with a machine that prints a simple list of the stuff you voted for.
Second, if the printout doesn't match what the voter wanted, then he just tries again, calls over a poll worker to fix the machine, or whatever. Again, it's not that hard to RTFV (Read The Fucking Vote)!
You have a lot more faith in the average person than I do. I don't believe that each and every person will verify each and every vote on his or her ballot and then turn it in, knowing that it is not his or her "real" vote.
Right, so you prefer the first option I listed for step 5: tallying the paper ballots directly, in which case they are the "real" vote.
it still doesn't solve the fundamental problem that you cannot physically verify what was on the screen
What was on the screen doesn't matter in the slightest, because the printout -- in plain English -- is the vote, and the voter can verify it simply by reading it before he drops it in the ballot box.
whether or not this printout matches that intent
If it doesn't match, the voter discards the incorrect vote and tries again.
There is not and cannot be any true record of what was showing on the screen and where the user touched the screen or what the user intended by touching the screen in that spot. That's the fundamental flaw and no amount of regulations, printouts, or open-source software can fix that.
That's not entirely true. You can make it work like this:
voter makes choices via touchscreen
the machine prints out a receipt listing (in plain typed English, in a font that's easily OCR-able) the choices made
the voter picks it up and verifies it
the voter puts it in a ballot box
either the paper ballot gets tallied directly
or the machine's log gets tallied and the paper ballot is retained for spot-checks and recounts
So, which is worse, they guy who people say is old, slow, from another era and believes it, or the guy that's presented by the media as a brilliant, towering intellect... who has such a flawed grip on reality that he still believes it?
It doesn't matter if McCain has a better grip on reality than Obama, because it doesn't change the fact that everything* about his platform is wrong!
(*with perhaps the sole exception being his support for the 2nd Amendment -- if only he felt that strongly about the rest of the Bill of Rights!)
Slashdot Mirror
It is immoral for Apple to tell me what to do with my property (i.e., a copy of OS X that I buy at retail). The only thing that Apple (or any software maker) should be justified in getting upset about me doing is committing copyright infringement. I should be able to run OS X on a PC. I should be able to benchmark Oracle. I should be able to use my AOL CD as a coaster! And neither AOL, Oracle, or Apple should be able to do anything what-so-fucking-ever about it, because it's my property!
EULAs are an affront to private ownership of property, because they make the rightful, legal owner of the property beholden to some third party for no good reason. They are, quite literally, fascist and contrary to the principles upon which this country (assuming you, like me, are from the US) was founded. That's why they're immoral and ought to be illegal, thankyouverymuch!
That installed copy is nothing more than an incidental consequence of the medium (i.e., that software has to be installed to be used). As long as the install media is sold along with it, it doesn't count as a separate copy.
No, distribution of unauthorized copies of copyrighted code to different people is copyright infringement. What Psystar is doing is nothing more than reselling the original copy (and, incidentally, format-shifting it as a convenience to the buyer).
Nope, it says "Apple-labeled," not "Macintosh." You could install OS X on an Apple II (if you could get it to run) and still comply with the EULA.
Of course, "Apple labeled" is a stupid term: as far as I'm concerned, if I stuck an Apple sticker (a couple of them come with OS X, by the way) on my Thinkpad then I think it ought to qualify!
You're completely right: Apple would certainly be free to stop selling OS X, including the copies installed on Macs, if it wanted. But if it wanted to be allowed to continue putting OS X on Macs, then it could very well be forced to sell it for non-Macs too.
But if they're the only service provider, then people are obligated to continue patronizing them. Contrapositively, they are then obligated not to be jerks. QED.
WTF? The plan jumps to 1 GB from 8 megabytes?! It's fucking absurd that telecoms are allowed to get away with completely fucking over everyone who wants reasonable service at a price point lower than the most expensive plan like this!
(And no, the 1GB plan is not a reasonable change from unlimited... but the "connect 25" and "connect 40" plans are even worse!)
Tetris!
It doesn't matter: you can't tell very well from the picture, but it's much taller than all the trees around it (which are full-size, by the way). It would stick out no matter how well they disguised it.
That doesn't work everywhere, though. Here in Georgia they have towers that look nothing at all like pine trees.
Yeah, but we're talking about "faith" as religious jargon, not in a general sense.
No, it's there so that you can be called upon to defend the country full stop. It says nothing about not overthrowing the government. This is an important distinction, because sometimes "defending the country" and "overthrowing the government" are the same thing.
I'm not sure, but I think Jefferson might just have had some personal experience with that kind of situation...
Yes, I realize that, and you're still wrong. Faith is not simply believing something without proof, it is believing something without the possibility of proof or in the face of disproof.
Here are some examples:
This is demonstratively false. There has never been a single instance in history where Comcast has ever lowered its prices. In reality, tiered pricing would mean that the light users pay exactly the same amount as before, heavy users (and moderate users!) pay more, and Comcast gets an increase in profits.
And what about those of us -- the vast majority of us, I'd wager -- who want something like 768k for $10/month instead of 16M for $50? The monopoly completely screws us over! Sure, in theory you could get something like this with DSL, but by the time you pay for a phone line (or the BS charge for "naked" DSL) you're back up to $40/month anyway.
But they're not the same thing. In fact, "faith in scientific principles" is a nonsensical statement: the only fundamental scientific principle is the Scientific Method itself, and the Scientific Method does not require faith.
Even the axioms all the rest of science is built upon don't require faith; they're nothing more than the guesses that, as far as we can tell, come closest to matching the observable reality. The only "faith" involved would be if you continued to believe an axiom or principle after it was disproved (e.g. the Earth-centric universe after Galileo), and that's obviously the opposite of science.
That proves that people are idiots, not that science and religion are equivalent.
Or an agnostic. After all, if atheism were not "active disbelief," then there is no useful distinction between the terms "atheist" and "agnostic."
Yes, religion is different in one very important way: it requires faith. In contrast, believing that the sun's energy causes your body to form vitamin D (which, by the way, is a much fairer way to describe it than the phrase you used) does not require faith, because we know that we could look up the proof if we cared to expend the effort.
In other words, scientific facts are provable. Even if we do not demand that proof, it still exists. Religion, on the other hand, is not provable. (And that's by definition: if it were provable, it wouldn't be religion anymore.)
That's some big news!
That would hurt nVidia much more than it would hurt Intel.
Nvidia is not Transmeta.
If the voter is that fucking stupid, then why would we care about his vote anyway?! I mean yeah, literacy tests and whatnot are illegal (and rightly so), but it's certainly not discriminatory to expect people to be able to follow a set of simple, reasonable directions!
First of all, fill-in-the-oval ballots would have their share of failure modes too. Haven't you ever heard of someone taking a multiple-choice test and failing horribly because they skipped an answer and then put all the answers subsequent to that one row above the one they should have gone in? What if they use the wrong kind of pencil (or a pen)? What if they fill in half a bubble? What if they fill in two bubbles? What if they write an X over the choice they want instead of filling in the bubble? Now, my answer for all these situations would of course be the same as above: throw out the incompetent dumbass's vote. But the rate of incompetency, I believe, would be far higher with fill-in-the-oval ballots than with a machine that prints a simple list of the stuff you voted for.
Second, if the printout doesn't match what the voter wanted, then he just tries again, calls over a poll worker to fix the machine, or whatever. Again, it's not that hard to RTFV (Read The Fucking Vote)!
Right, so you prefer the first option I listed for step 5: tallying the paper ballots directly, in which case they are the "real" vote.
What was on the screen doesn't matter in the slightest, because the printout -- in plain English -- is the vote, and the voter can verify it simply by reading it before he drops it in the ballot box.
If it doesn't match, the voter discards the incorrect vote and tries again.
That's not entirely true. You can make it work like this:
The mere fact that someone was able to install the antivirus software means that there is a serious flaw in the design of the machine.
It doesn't matter if McCain has a better grip on reality than Obama, because it doesn't change the fact that everything* about his platform is wrong!
(*with perhaps the sole exception being his support for the 2nd Amendment -- if only he felt that strongly about the rest of the Bill of Rights!)