I have a concern that my (future) grandchildren might have to grow up in a goddamn totalitarian dictatorship because of anti-American sociopaths like Feinstein. In fact, I'm way more worried about that than I am about Internet predators!
No gun control is not about preventing terrorists go crazy.
Of course it isn't. Gun control is about preventing the citizenry from rising up against a tyrannical state.
(That sort if issue is why the Second Amendment exists, you know. The whole damn Bill of Rights was written by a bunch of revolutionaries who had just finished violently overthrowing a government.)
If you think property rights (actual property rights, not Imaginary Property rights) are "entitlement," then you can go fuck yourself too! Using these kinds of legal shenanigans to make owners of property beholden to third-parties is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the foundation of our society and turn us all back into serfs (bound to corporations instead of the land, but serfs nonetheless), and I will not stand for it!
My first thought was "it's about time they were put out of their misery; I haven't needed a separate sound card in 15 years!" My second thought was "wait, WTF does Facebook have to do with it?"
Obviously, you're talking about some kind of delusional caricature of the Green Party and not the actual thing itself; thus, engaging with you is pointless.
Then I encourage you to hire a legal team and start suing software companies based on your legal theories, since you seem to feel you have the right to dictate to Microsoft how they should run their business and treat their customers. Good luck with that.
I'm under the impression that -- given that I have no legal agreement with Microsoft -- I have no standing to sue them. Instead, I have to wait for them to sue me for my alleged violation of the alleged EULA, and that hasn't happened yet.
You're free to reject MS's updates and spying. But they're under no obligation to make it easy for you; you'll need to block them at the firewall to be really sure. Again, the smart way is to simply opt out.
I do block Microsoft at the firewall -- my router's firewall, not Windows', for obvious reasons -- and as a practical matter, I agree that boycotting is a reasonable individual course of action. (I'm also planning on switching back to Linux, but haven't gotten around to it yet.)
However, I still (a) want to see my argument tested in court and (b) object to people (e.g. you) talking about software being "licensed, not sold" as if it's some sort of legal fait accompli, when it simply isn't.
The "Ten Key Values" of the US Green Party are as follows:
Grassroots democracy
Social justice
Ecological wisdom
Nonviolence
Decentralization
Community-based economics
Feminism
Respect for diversity
Global responsibility
Future focus
Of those ten items, I see three (grassroots democracy, decentralization and community-based economics) that directly conflict with your claim of support for central planning. Clearly, you're just flat-out wrong about that part.
As for the "social justice" aspect, you're right that they claim to be a social justice group, but we could argue all day long about what "social justice" actually means. First of all, I would posit that a "weak form" of social justice is really nothing more than strong respect for civil liberties and perhaps even laissez-faire economics (same as the Libertarians), albeit with a strong emphasis on the fourth principle (that corporations are creatures of the state and thus regulation to prevent unfairness is justified -- a principle corporatists such as the Republicans often seem to forget, by the way...). Second, even Greens who support a stronger form of social justice should still want it to happen at the local level (in keeping with the other "key values"), so they could form a commune for themselves and the folks in the next town over could be left to their own governance.
The UCC establishes that when an item is sold, the buyer owns it free and clear. (Subject to law, of course, but not subject to the whim of the seller.)
Whether the product (henceforth referred to as my property) contains copyrighted software is irrelevant; I already acquired the right to use said copy of the software by virtue of buying it.
In particular, I do not need any additional permissions from the copyright holder to make copies incidental to running the software (e.g. copying it into RAM); 17 USC 117 makes an explicit exception for that.
In other words, after I hand my money over to the retailer, the transaction is over and I have no further obligation or relationship to the retailer (and I never had any relationship or obligation to the copyright holder, unless the retailer and copyright holder were the same entity).
Because I have my property and all the rights under law necessary to use it as I see fit, I have no obligation to concede anything else to the copyright holder. License agreements, like any contract, must constitute an offer (aka "consideration") to be valid. Because the alleged-license only claims to offer me the rights I already have, it really offers nothing at all and thus is not a valid contract.
Because of the preceding facts, any text the software presents to me or any button I have to click to use it is incidental, irrelevant, and does not constitute any sort of legal agreement whatsoever. The act of clicking a button labeled "I accept" at the bottom of a window labeled "license agreement" has no more legal significance than opening a book or putting the needle in the groove of a phonograph.
To my knowledge, this is a line of reasoning which has never actually been tested in court. If you can cite a case where it was -- especially one decided at the appellate or higher level -- feel free to cite it.
Now, if you want to argue that licenses for software which are agreed to before or concurrently as money is transacted (i.e., where it is acquired in a way that is genuinely different from a "sale") are valid, that's fine -- but that's a different situation. Also, if you want to argue that an EULA "offers" a warranty or tech support or something, I'll concede that too -- but will point out that the property owner is perfectly free to reject said warranty or whatever and still use his property.
Oh, okay, so you have no goddamn clue what you're talking about then.
(FYI, the Green Party is left-libertarian. In particular, like the Libertarian Party, the Green Party supports "anti-federalism" and seeks to weaken the Federal government allowing state and local governments to take up the slack (or not, as they see fit). The main point of contention between Greens and Libertarians is their approach to solving the Tragedy of the Commons. Of course, by the fact that the Greens and Libertarians tend to arrive at the same principles from opposite directions, they tend to "violently agree" about them and their specific policies sometimes wind up very different...)
Wrong. They licensed the OS. The customer does NOT own the OS.
I don't give a shit about what you or even some sell-out judge says. This is WRONG (morally and factually) and anyone who believes it should go fuck himself!
Yeah, but it was just a bunch of whiny lowbrow faux-environmentalist propaganda. Oil is dirty and it sucks and other things are already cheaper. There is no need for a weird imagined oil supply catastrophe in order for people to switch to cheaper, cleaner, better fuel sources. That is happening already.
The transition is happening already because of concern over peak oil. If those environmentalists you deride had not existed, we'd still be careening towards the cliff in our 8 MPG V8 land-yacht Buicks.
That's because, for the majority of the US outside of Florida and maybe Southern California and the southern tip of Texas, the choice is between tropical fruit that can survive shipping or no tropical fruit at all.
Connecting a no-fly list and a no-weapons list is not inherently a bad idea; the problem is that the no-fly list (or maybe both lists, for all I know) need a fuck-ton of reforms to protect civil rights applied first.
Essentially, the "Socialist" government is now a center right government, complete with war and security posturing.
"War and security posturing" is orthogonal to the left-right (liberal-conservative) axis. What you're actually complaining about is that the Socialist party is becoming more authoritarian, not that it's becoming more conservative.
Plus, the weasel words here are pretty obvious: Google admits to collecting students personal information, but tries to hide behind "we only use it in aggregate".
Not to mention, the people at Google should know in more exquisite detail than just about everybody else (except maybe Facebook and the NSA) exactly how incredibly easy it is to dis-aggregate aggregate data.
Jewish people, of course, don't believe that Satan is an evil being, and properly refer to him as "the Satan" (since that's how the text is actually written), a being that works directly under God's supervision as something like a prosecuting attorney.
I'm pretty sure the "attorney" part contradicts the "[not] an evil being" part.
The real reason we see this is twofold - first, because of manufacturing and second, because of fraud.
No, you missed the third -- and most important -- reason: if the corporate oligarchy can abolish the concept of property rights (only for "consumers," of course), they can turn us all into serfs and force to rent everything from them in perpetuity.
Playing the devil's advocate... Where exactly is our "right to repair" granted? Is it in the constitution? Is it a bill signed into law?
What part of the concept of "ownership of property" do you not understand? It's been a fucking axiom of English common law since before English common law even existed!
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I have a concern that my (future) grandchildren might have to grow up in a goddamn totalitarian dictatorship because of anti-American sociopaths like Feinstein. In fact, I'm way more worried about that than I am about Internet predators!
Of course it isn't. Gun control is about preventing the citizenry from rising up against a tyrannical state.
(That sort if issue is why the Second Amendment exists, you know. The whole damn Bill of Rights was written by a bunch of revolutionaries who had just finished violently overthrowing a government.)
If you think property rights (actual property rights, not Imaginary Property rights) are "entitlement," then you can go fuck yourself too! Using these kinds of legal shenanigans to make owners of property beholden to third-parties is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the foundation of our society and turn us all back into serfs (bound to corporations instead of the land, but serfs nonetheless), and I will not stand for it!
My first thought was "it's about time they were put out of their misery; I haven't needed a separate sound card in 15 years!" My second thought was "wait, WTF does Facebook have to do with it?"
Obviously, you're talking about some kind of delusional caricature of the Green Party and not the actual thing itself; thus, engaging with you is pointless.
I'm under the impression that -- given that I have no legal agreement with Microsoft -- I have no standing to sue them. Instead, I have to wait for them to sue me for my alleged violation of the alleged EULA, and that hasn't happened yet.
I do block Microsoft at the firewall -- my router's firewall, not Windows', for obvious reasons -- and as a practical matter, I agree that boycotting is a reasonable individual course of action. (I'm also planning on switching back to Linux, but haven't gotten around to it yet.)
However, I still (a) want to see my argument tested in court and (b) object to people (e.g. you) talking about software being "licensed, not sold" as if it's some sort of legal fait accompli, when it simply isn't.
The "Ten Key Values" of the US Green Party are as follows:
Of those ten items, I see three (grassroots democracy, decentralization and community-based economics) that directly conflict with your claim of support for central planning. Clearly, you're just flat-out wrong about that part.
As for the "social justice" aspect, you're right that they claim to be a social justice group, but we could argue all day long about what "social justice" actually means. First of all, I would posit that a "weak form" of social justice is really nothing more than strong respect for civil liberties and perhaps even laissez-faire economics (same as the Libertarians), albeit with a strong emphasis on the fourth principle (that corporations are creatures of the state and thus regulation to prevent unfairness is justified -- a principle corporatists such as the Republicans often seem to forget, by the way...). Second, even Greens who support a stronger form of social justice should still want it to happen at the local level (in keeping with the other "key values"), so they could form a commune for themselves and the folks in the next town over could be left to their own governance.
And all of that precedent nevertheless manages to be either incorrectly-reasoned or inapplicable, in conflict with a plain reading of the Uniform Commercial Code and/or Copyright Law. Also, Wikipedia states "The legal status of shrink wrap contracts in the US is somewhat unclear."
Here's the gist:
To my knowledge, this is a line of reasoning which has never actually been tested in court. If you can cite a case where it was -- especially one decided at the appellate or higher level -- feel free to cite it.
Now, if you want to argue that licenses for software which are agreed to before or concurrently as money is transacted (i.e., where it is acquired in a way that is genuinely different from a "sale") are valid, that's fine -- but that's a different situation. Also, if you want to argue that an EULA "offers" a warranty or tech support or something, I'll concede that too -- but will point out that the property owner is perfectly free to reject said warranty or whatever and still use his property.
Oh, okay, so you have no goddamn clue what you're talking about then.
(FYI, the Green Party is left-libertarian. In particular, like the Libertarian Party, the Green Party supports "anti-federalism" and seeks to weaken the Federal government allowing state and local governments to take up the slack (or not, as they see fit). The main point of contention between Greens and Libertarians is their approach to solving the Tragedy of the Commons. Of course, by the fact that the Greens and Libertarians tend to arrive at the same principles from opposite directions, they tend to "violently agree" about them and their specific policies sometimes wind up very different...)
I don't give a shit about what you or even some sell-out judge says. This is WRONG (morally and factually) and anyone who believes it should go fuck himself!
Nah, LEO is better because then it can give the Earth lovely cross-hatched grill marks!
Oh yeah? Then how do you explain the Green Party?
The transition is happening already because of concern over peak oil. If those environmentalists you deride had not existed, we'd still be careening towards the cliff in our 8 MPG V8 land-yacht Buicks.
In most cities, the fastest way across town during rush hour is by bicycle.
That's because, for the majority of the US outside of Florida and maybe Southern California and the southern tip of Texas, the choice is between tropical fruit that can survive shipping or no tropical fruit at all.
Tasteless apples, however, are indefensible.
Connecting a no-fly list and a no-weapons list is not inherently a bad idea; the problem is that the no-fly list (or maybe both lists, for all I know) need a fuck-ton of reforms to protect civil rights applied first.
"War and security posturing" is orthogonal to the left-right (liberal-conservative) axis. What you're actually complaining about is that the Socialist party is becoming more authoritarian, not that it's becoming more conservative.
Not to mention, the people at Google should know in more exquisite detail than just about everybody else (except maybe Facebook and the NSA) exactly how incredibly easy it is to dis-aggregate aggregate data.
I'm pretty sure the "attorney" part contradicts the "[not] an evil being" part.
Living up to your name (but not so much your .sig), I see.
Sanders can win if defeatist assholes like you would STFU.
As a guy who does all the maintenance on my cars myself, I'd just like to say fuck you.
Bullshit. It merely required systemd to play nice and use similar interfaces to the perfectly-good existing software it's trying to replace!
No, you missed the third -- and most important -- reason: if the corporate oligarchy can abolish the concept of property rights (only for "consumers," of course), they can turn us all into serfs and force to rent everything from them in perpetuity.
What part of the concept of "ownership of property" do you not understand? It's been a fucking axiom of English common law since before English common law even existed!