I think even when you buy a windoze pre-installed, you have to click on it when the machine fires up the first time
What if you purchace a PC from a mom & pop store? Are you bound by the EULA that pop clicked on when he was installing your video card drivers for you? Is he bound to the EULA because he was the one who clicked?
The only good answer I can come up with is that he must print the EULAs and have you sign them when you pick up your PC. All three parties are then bound (you to him, and him to MS) into a strange love/hate triangle.
If it was later found that the EULA had been violated, I wonder who would spend time in the federal prison?
Ok, I'll take a stab at telling you why EULAs are bad.
1. You don't sign an EULA. In order for a contract to be valid it must be signed by both parties and the original must be given to the End User. There is no reason Microsoft couldn't release Digital Sig 1.0 today and require that a EULA have a valid sig. If you wonder why the YES/NO thing is bad, as yourself who installed your mom's software. If a third party installs software for your mom and clicks yes, should she be held accountable for an agreement she never saw? Or is the third party the one bound to the EULA?
2. EULAs are not easy to understand by common sense. If I buy a car, I can use it anywhere. I can let anyone ride in my car. I can let anyone borrow my car. Why is a Win98 disk any different? You can say that the disk is easy to copy and the car is not. That is a major factor, but I don't think the prob should be solved under legal terms. Agian, Digital Sig 1.0 could be used to authenticate a user's sig agianst a product code and compare them with a MD5 on a server at Redmond. Why haven't they done that already? If I was into conspericaies, I'd say it's because MS wants you to be doing something illegal. That way, they control you.
3. The terms of the EULA are subject to change after you agree. Right there, the whole legality of the system comes crashing down. If you and I agree to meet at 4:30pm at the MS Campus, and I show up at 6:30, who's the asshole? Well, seeing as how I changed the meeting time and posted the change on the back door of my house, you would be the asshole for not checking to see if the time had been changed. Also, what gives one party the right to change a contract and not the other. As of now, I am changing the EULA of my copy of Win2k to reflect that it is now covered under the GNU/GPL. Is that legal? After all, MS has been given notice of the change(in this forum).
In America, you study a book and take a written exam and a driving test to get a license. In Italy, you attend a year of driving school where you learn a LOT about cars and how to drive them. The school costs about $2000 which can be overwhelming when you consider the avreage Italian makes less than $25000/year, and pays about 35% income tax in addition to a 20% sales tax on all consumer items.
As a 25yo American in Italy, I knew a lot of people my age who were not able to afford a car, much less a license. On top of that, gas was about $4/gallon, maybe more. In America, driving is really a right, even if the book referes to it as a privelege.
Another good thing in Italy is that the older population does not drive. This gets rid of a good percentage of the people who should not be on the road in the first place.
First of all i get a nice time to step back and defrag my mind during the long ass reboot
When you get into the real world, you will find that most bosses understand the concept of thinking time. See The Hacker FAQ for detail on how hackers work. We all need time to think, bosses get that.
If every couple of hours somehting is wrong and it takes me a half an hour to fix it thats fun time for me
Agian, in the real world, you get paid to do a specific job. I program and monitor routers. When my computer breaks, I call the Help Desk and log a job. I like working on computers too, but at work, my job is not to fix broken computers. If I were to try and fix my box, I would probably get fired for goofing off. The chances that I would really make the prob worse is slim, but still, it is someone elses job. I get paid $60k to fix routers, the help desk gets paid $40k to fix PCs. You do the math.
Think more along the lines of computer user. A worker can have his own desk, and his own thin client. If his thin client catches on fire, it takes like 5 minutes to restore it. If you need help on an application, just take your smartcard to your co-workers desk and ask him to look at it. Same for presentations.
And from an admin point, I just finished patching 20 boxes for known security holes. Wouldn't it be great to just patch one server?
I don't think the point of this tech it to get rid of your desk, just to get rid of the concept of "Bob's computer".
Check out Kuro5hin.org for 2 good articles by a guy trying to get his Doctorate in particle physics. The first article is: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/1/3712/31700
The second is: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/14/19363/8142
Both are general physics introductions, but they talk about quantium structure. There are also several good articles on howstuffworks.com explaining specifics of physics in detail.
I remember a few late-nite covert ops missions that involved plugging my laptop into an unnamed companies gateway router. I seem to remember downloading 3 mandrake disks in under an hour. There was so much data passing, the mouse actually stopped responding for large periods of time.
majority of pain killers being sold in drug stores was causing a major adiction problem
Addiction is your problem, not mine. If I want to be addicted to moriphine, that is none of your buisness.
also causing quite a bit of deaths
If a bottle says take one every 24 hours, and you take one every hour, who is at fault? Should my right to have one every day be taken because you can't/won't follow directions. OTOH, if the bottle says take one an hour and that causes death, then the company producing the product is at fault. Do you then ban the product because the company was stupid, or do you just fine the company and have them change their labling?
stupid mom giving their crying baby a little morphine
Child abuse is already agianst the law. Why make things illegal just because they can be used to abuse a child?
No, my friend, the politicians are not that manevolent. They banned drugs because they cannot control production. Any idiot can grow poppies and canibis. Tobacco is HARD to grow and alcohol is tough to distil. The government can license tobacco and hops fields and then tax the output. They can't tax you if you grow poppies for your own use. If they can't tax it, they ban it.
There was, in '93ish, a couple having sex in their house in Georgia. Someone taped them, and then called to police. The couple was charged with a publid display of lewdness and fined many hundreds of dollars.
The Southern states SUCK...BAD.
Heroin is illegal for race reasons. While the Chinese slaves were building the railroads, they smoked opium. After the railroads were finished, the Chinese moved to the West Coast and frequented Opium Bars. White women were attracted to these opium bars (to smoke opium) and White men were upset. They outlawed opium. Now the derivitaves are also illegal.
Marajuana is the Mexican name for Canibis. In America (about 100 years ago), Canibis was called Hemp. Ever wonder why Americans refer to a plant by it's Mexican name? Do you need three guesses to realise it's to make it sound "Mexican"? Guess who Americans hated around the time of the criminilization of Hemp?
Once we started down the road of criminilizing things people liked doing, it really didn't stop. Well, you could say that it stopped with the nullification of prohibition, but in reality, that was just a minor bump. The government continues to restrict drug use in as many ways as possible. Just look at tobacco. Even people who smoke say it is a filthy habit. The government is slowly making everyone think the world would be better off without tobacco.
MS is not trying to kill Sony. At least, not yet. MS is trying to occupy the #2 position in what has always been a 2 player market.
Once they have the #2 slot firm, the XBox 1.1 will make people drool with the promise of VHS-quality films broadcast from the MS servers. Maybe 2 films a month for the basic service fee.
XBox 2.0 will have a QoS system to make sure you actually get your film. From there, a partnership with AOL/Time Warner to include commercials while you are gaming/watching TV.
XBox 2.1 will be a PVR system...with no fast-forward.
On a slip of paper in a book at the library referencing another book at another library. The reference number is the ISBN multiplied by the reverse of the year on the Jewish calender I was born in. That book has a number in the front cover. That number of pages from the last full page of text towards the front of the book is a page with X paragraphs and Y words in the first paragraph. X chapters and Y pages into the Cryptonomicon is an underlined passage.
Just in case the main site gets/.'ed, It basicly involves a powerful bulb being sent through a LCD. He is using 2 fresnels to help get rid of some of the distortion, but I'll belive the quality when I see it.
BTW...My office just picked up a NICE LCD thingy. It has 4 video inputs, 2 computer inputs (displayed PIP-style or side-by-side), and a 100mbps ethernet switch. We paid close to $10k. In my opinion, it was worth every penny. I'd rather spend $10k on something worth it than $500~~$1000 on something not worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
The agreement is to the END USER, not to the BUTON CLICKER. Even if my 6yo daughter clicks YES, as soon as I fire up WordXP, I am bound. Or am I?
I think even when you buy a windoze pre-installed, you have to click on it when the machine fires up the first time
What if you purchace a PC from a mom & pop store? Are you bound by the EULA that pop clicked on when he was installing your video card drivers for you? Is he bound to the EULA because he was the one who clicked?
The only good answer I can come up with is that he must print the EULAs and have you sign them when you pick up your PC. All three parties are then bound (you to him, and him to MS) into a strange love/hate triangle.
If it was later found that the EULA had been violated, I wonder who would spend time in the federal prison?
Ok, I'll take a stab at telling you why EULAs are bad.
1. You don't sign an EULA. In order for a contract to be valid it must be signed by both parties and the original must be given to the End User. There is no reason Microsoft couldn't release Digital Sig 1.0 today and require that a EULA have a valid sig. If you wonder why the YES/NO thing is bad, as yourself who installed your mom's software. If a third party installs software for your mom and clicks yes, should she be held accountable for an agreement she never saw? Or is the third party the one bound to the EULA?
2. EULAs are not easy to understand by common sense. If I buy a car, I can use it anywhere. I can let anyone ride in my car. I can let anyone borrow my car. Why is a Win98 disk any different? You can say that the disk is easy to copy and the car is not. That is a major factor, but I don't think the prob should be solved under legal terms. Agian, Digital Sig 1.0 could be used to authenticate a user's sig agianst a product code and compare them with a MD5 on a server at Redmond. Why haven't they done that already? If I was into conspericaies, I'd say it's because MS wants you to be doing something illegal. That way, they control you.
3. The terms of the EULA are subject to change after you agree. Right there, the whole legality of the system comes crashing down. If you and I agree to meet at 4:30pm at the MS Campus, and I show up at 6:30, who's the asshole? Well, seeing as how I changed the meeting time and posted the change on the back door of my house, you would be the asshole for not checking to see if the time had been changed. Also, what gives one party the right to change a contract and not the other. As of now, I am changing the EULA of my copy of Win2k to reflect that it is now covered under the GNU/GPL. Is that legal? After all, MS has been given notice of the change(in this forum).
In America, you study a book and take a written exam and a driving test to get a license. In Italy, you attend a year of driving school where you learn a LOT about cars and how to drive them. The school costs about $2000 which can be overwhelming when you consider the avreage Italian makes less than $25000/year, and pays about 35% income tax in addition to a 20% sales tax on all consumer items.
As a 25yo American in Italy, I knew a lot of people my age who were not able to afford a car, much less a license. On top of that, gas was about $4/gallon, maybe more. In America, driving is really a right, even if the book referes to it as a privelege.
Another good thing in Italy is that the older population does not drive. This gets rid of a good percentage of the people who should not be on the road in the first place.
Is Sam Jackson forcing Bruce Willis onto the dev team?
Made me fatter and older...relatively speaking.
Even better, replace the seats with chairs...Nice comfy ones.
First of all i get a nice time to step back and defrag my mind during the long ass reboot
When you get into the real world, you will find that most bosses understand the concept of thinking time. See The Hacker FAQ for detail on how hackers work. We all need time to think, bosses get that.
If every couple of hours somehting is wrong and it takes me a half an hour to fix it thats fun time for me
Agian, in the real world, you get paid to do a specific job. I program and monitor routers. When my computer breaks, I call the Help Desk and log a job. I like working on computers too, but at work, my job is not to fix broken computers. If I were to try and fix my box, I would probably get fired for goofing off. The chances that I would really make the prob worse is slim, but still, it is someone elses job. I get paid $60k to fix routers, the help desk gets paid $40k to fix PCs. You do the math.
Think more along the lines of computer user. A worker can have his own desk, and his own thin client. If his thin client catches on fire, it takes like 5 minutes to restore it. If you need help on an application, just take your smartcard to your co-workers desk and ask him to look at it. Same for presentations.
And from an admin point, I just finished patching 20 boxes for known security holes. Wouldn't it be great to just patch one server?
I don't think the point of this tech it to get rid of your desk, just to get rid of the concept of "Bob's computer".
Looking at the replies...and the scores, I'm glad the moderators in here still understand sarcasm.
In the future, use a if you want to avoid the stupidity displayed by the other replaies to your post...
I, for one, thought it was funny as hell.
Check out Kuro5hin.org for 2 good articles by a guy trying to get his Doctorate in particle physics. The first article is: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/1/3712/31700
2
The second is: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/14/19363/814
Both are general physics introductions, but they talk about quantium structure. There are also several good articles on howstuffworks.com explaining specifics of physics in detail.
Everyone will not die. The dead, however, will be the lucky ones. Ever see "Threads", or "The Day After"?
how about the others...the girl was pretty good?
Yeah, but GODDAMN at the FUCKIN' LAG
I remember a few late-nite covert ops missions that involved plugging my laptop into an unnamed companies gateway router. I seem to remember downloading 3 mandrake disks in under an hour. There was so much data passing, the mouse actually stopped responding for large periods of time.
That's a long goddamn time to have a girlfriend. Maybe you should marry that chick one day before you retire:)
majority of pain killers being sold in drug stores was causing a major adiction problem
Addiction is your problem, not mine. If I want to be addicted to moriphine, that is none of your buisness.
also causing quite a bit of deaths
If a bottle says take one every 24 hours, and you take one every hour, who is at fault? Should my right to have one every day be taken because you can't/won't follow directions. OTOH, if the bottle says take one an hour and that causes death, then the company producing the product is at fault. Do you then ban the product because the company was stupid, or do you just fine the company and have them change their labling?
stupid mom giving their crying baby a little morphine
Child abuse is already agianst the law. Why make things illegal just because they can be used to abuse a child?
No, my friend, the politicians are not that manevolent. They banned drugs because they cannot control production. Any idiot can grow poppies and canibis. Tobacco is HARD to grow and alcohol is tough to distil. The government can license tobacco and hops fields and then tax the output. They can't tax you if you grow poppies for your own use. If they can't tax it, they ban it.
There was, in '93ish, a couple having sex in their house in Georgia. Someone taped them, and then called to police. The couple was charged with a publid display of lewdness and fined many hundreds of dollars.
The Southern states SUCK...BAD.
Heroin is illegal for race reasons. While the Chinese slaves were building the railroads, they smoked opium. After the railroads were finished, the Chinese moved to the West Coast and frequented Opium Bars. White women were attracted to these opium bars (to smoke opium) and White men were upset. They outlawed opium. Now the derivitaves are also illegal.
Marajuana is the Mexican name for Canibis. In America (about 100 years ago), Canibis was called Hemp. Ever wonder why Americans refer to a plant by it's Mexican name? Do you need three guesses to realise it's to make it sound "Mexican"? Guess who Americans hated around the time of the criminilization of Hemp?
Once we started down the road of criminilizing things people liked doing, it really didn't stop. Well, you could say that it stopped with the nullification of prohibition, but in reality, that was just a minor bump. The government continues to restrict drug use in as many ways as possible. Just look at tobacco. Even people who smoke say it is a filthy habit. The government is slowly making everyone think the world would be better off without tobacco.
MS is not trying to kill Sony. At least, not yet. MS is trying to occupy the #2 position in what has always been a 2 player market.
Once they have the #2 slot firm, the XBox 1.1 will make people drool with the promise of VHS-quality films broadcast from the MS servers. Maybe 2 films a month for the basic service fee.
XBox 2.0 will have a QoS system to make sure you actually get your film. From there, a partnership with AOL/Time Warner to include commercials while you are gaming/watching TV.
XBox 2.1 will be a PVR system...with no fast-forward.
How about duct-taping the envelope to a frickin rock.
On a slip of paper in a book at the library referencing another book at another library. The reference number is the ISBN multiplied by the reverse of the year on the Jewish calender I was born in. That book has a number in the front cover. That number of pages from the last full page of text towards the front of the book is a page with X paragraphs and Y words in the first paragraph. X chapters and Y pages into the Cryptonomicon is an underlined passage.
ROT-13 that to get my key.
Didn't they explain that on CSI last season...next season...Jack the Ripper
If you don't have $10k for something you need, then you don't have $500 for something you don't need.
Just in case the main site gets /.'ed, It basicly involves a powerful bulb being sent through a LCD. He is using 2 fresnels to help get rid of some of the distortion, but I'll belive the quality when I see it.
A link from the main site: DIY LCD Projector
BTW...My office just picked up a NICE LCD thingy. It has 4 video inputs, 2 computer inputs (displayed PIP-style or side-by-side), and a 100mbps ethernet switch. We paid close to $10k. In my opinion, it was worth every penny. I'd rather spend $10k on something worth it than $500~~$1000 on something not worth it.