The 'database' idea you suggest has the following problems: first, every company uses different terms, so every EULA you read will trigger 'different terms' flag in your database. Unless you can find a way to catch only 'outrageous' terms, even when companies are trying to slip such things through your filter. If you can do that, please apply it to spam filtering, and maybe to developing a properly Turing-capable AI. This means that the user still gets shown an EULA every time they install software, just like now.
Second, software companies want to screw you with EULAs. Why are they going to cooperate with your device whose purpose is to make it hard?
Third, you are not just asking software companies to cooperate with a device whose sole purpose is to make it harder for them to screw you over, you are asking _them_ to pay _you_ for the privilege. That's like asking a guy walking the streets with a SWAG bag over his shoulder to give you £10 towards the costs of a burglar alarm. Before you suggest that there should be a law, you won't get a law without public support or lots of money; if you have public support then EULAs will be less restrictive because otherwise no-one would buy the software, and you do not have lots of money: you are not a big software company.
Fourth, the 'savings in frictionless commmerce' would be miniscule. Most people do simply click through EULAs, as you say. That won't be made any quicker by the standardised thing. Most people don't ever breach the EULA, either, and those that do mostly don't get caught. So, when would your idea save money? It would do so when someone like me installed something, because I do read EULAs. On the other hand, that would be about an hour in the last year, and most of that was EULAs of games - which I install in my own free time, commercial value zero. So at best £10 per person who reads EULAs per year. Maybe £100,000. Being optimistic. When else would it save time or money? Never. EULA enforcement won't change. If you don't like the terms you still have to spend the time trying to return the thing just like before.
In other words, you have come up with a solution to a problem which addresses all the technical aspects pretty well, but just assumes the social aspects work the way you want them to. They don't.
It's like designing a cheap machine to stop rapes, which consists of a little ring which blokes put over their cocks, plus a bit of hardware which detects the distance between the cock and an appropriate orifice, and triggers when it reaches zero, except in the cases where the other person wants it (which it gets right every time), and controls for accidental bumps (again it is perfect) which aren't an attempted rape, et cetera. When it triggers the ring contracts and cuts the bloke's cock off. So, perfect solution technically - stops all rapes, has no false positives, but would never be used by any significant fraction of the public: hopefully that's obvious?
I've never read the actual text of the law that says I am not allowed to commit murder. Nor have most people. In fact, most people have never read most laws. Does that mean we can all ignore them too?
You seem to think most people read the small print on financial contracts. If you bother to check, you'll find this is not true. For example, if you are buying some piece of kit, you can buy it now for £120, or pay nothing for six months then 12 easy monthly £9.99 payments. Not very uncommon, and a lot of people look at the two options and go for the latter without ever reading the small print. The small print will tell you that you are responsible for ensuring all the payments get to the company on time, miss them and you will be raped.
But the company makes a shedload of money off those contracts, because a lot of people forget, or don't worry too much about it, and find themselves getting hit by large penalties. Which they did not know about because they did not read the small print.
Your typical EULA comes up on a page with a Next button which you can't press until you find the checkbox which says 'I have read and agree to this'. Some of them even check that you've actually scrolled through the whole document before allowing you to go on. If you do not read the EULA, then it is not because you have forgotten, or you didn't know you had to, it is because you were too lazy. On-line, about all you could do to make it even more clear to people that they have to read the thing is to require them to type the text 'I have read and agree', and all that would do is penalise people who can't spell, lazy guys would still type it without reading.
As to reasonable expectations.. the company will let you use the software if you agree, if you don't you can't use the software. As long as people keep buying software with those terms, then companies will keep those terms. In other words, the reason you are being forced into these restrictive EULAs is that Joe Average doesn't mind. If you want better terms, put the company in a position where it has to offer better terms or lose sales (and just yours doesn't count, one person is insignificant). Go out and convince Joe Average not to buy software with restrictive EULAs, or accept them as they are now.
See my comments on your database idea - short terms, it's not going to work.
If you and I sign a contract, and then I come along next week with another contract, you don't have to sign it. If anything in it contradicts the original contract, we can't sign it until we break the original. But as long as nothing contradicts, if you sign it you are bound by both. If you don't like it that's tough, you signed.
If an MMORPG EULA changes, then either there is a contradiction between the old and new versions, in which case you can't sign (legally, even if you accept it's void). If there is no discrepancy, and you agree, then you are bound by all the new conditions.
If the 'original' EULA guarantees you nothing, which in this case, like most, is pretty much true, then chances are any changed version is something you can sign without a contradiction. IOW, if you don't agree to the new EULA, you can't continue to play. No in-between option is required. The only thing you get is that if you have paid in advance for a month (or other time period), they must allow you to continue playing, with the old contract, for the rest of the month (or other time period). Possibly they might be able to word the original contract so that if they issue a new contract which you do not agree to then they can refund your money on the time you haven't used and kick you off now, debatable.
In order: The parent or guardian of the minor is responsible (but you'd probably get out of it in court if you could show you never knew about the software). If you don't like the EULA, then the store can refuse to return your money, the company can't. They can require you to pay the shipping charge for all the stuff you bought, but once they have the bought stuff they must return your money. This will not stop them being obstructionist, but at worst, if you produce court papers they will settle. If you bypassed the EULA, that's probably a DMCA violation now. In any case, if you knew it existed then you will lose in court. You can only win if you can convince the jury that you just happened by accident to run the software in such a way that the EULA never showed. Chances are that you lose when the software company says 'the install script runs as soon as you put the disc in the drive, and it displays the EULA. This person deliberately bypassed it, hence they knew the EULA existed and were trying to avoid seeing it.'. Whatever, morally if you know there is an agreement which you must accept to run the software, you should not try to bypass it. If the software is so incredibly badly written that it can genuinely fail to show the EULA in normal situations, OTOH, the software company will not get its EULA rights. If you do not agree to the EULA, then you can do what you like for private (non-commercial) purposes. Copyright does not mean you cannot copy. It means you cannot copy and sell, distribute, etc. You are bound by it without ever agreeing to anything - you are bound by copyright as soon as the software company burns a master disc, perhaps before you've ever heard of the product, let alone bought it. Once you own the disc, you can do what you like, break copy protection, modify it, disassemble it, whatever. But you are not allowed to let anyone know about it, and you are not allowed to create derivative works and sell, distribute, etc. them. Basically, restrictions on what you can do like that, although they're in the EULA, are either already covered by copyright (if you don't keep it private) or not legally binding and in any case unenforceable (if you do keep it private, no-one can find that you've ignored the restrictions).
Comment: if you want to change EULAs, then the law is useless, you must try to persuade Joe Average that a restrictive EULA means he shouldn't buy the software, then the company will issue less restrictive EULAs. If on the other hand you want to change copyright status of software (per ESR) then you need to get the law changed. Currently people seem to be trying to get the law on EULAs changed and convince Joe Public that software should be free. Which is the wrong way about.
If you don't read the EULA, then you deserve to suffer if it says something you don't like.
Just like you deserve to suffer, and I will laugh at you, if you sign up for a loan with nice figures in big writing on the front but don't bother reading the small print where it says that the slightest misstep will result in being raped massively.
It is _not_ like a deaf person signing terms of a contract at a person who does not know sign language, then tricking them into shaking hands to 'seal' it (which isn't legally binding anyway). You know perfectly well the EULA is a contract, the button you click to move on tells you that you must have read and agreed, and you decided not to bother. You are exactly as stupid as the guy who finds himself tied into unpleasant loan terms because he decided not to bother reading the small print.
I think I might write a bit of software to do something minor and vaguely useful, or perhaps just pretty, plus a phone home on install just to see how many people do install it, and stick in an EULA containing something like 'This software contains a script which finds all email addresses used on this computer and bypasses all forms of mail filtering on many common email clients. You agree to allow $me to send mail, including advertisements, to any and all of the email addresses found, in perpetuity'. Which would be totally legal; and is, quite explicitly, a license to spam you into oblivion until you get the script off the computer and get new email addresses. And of course, when a guy like you can't be bothered to read the EULA, it will be entirely your fault for being an idiot.
And the answer to the question, 'what is the benefit to the end user in signing the EULA' is that the end user gets to use the software. There is no other benefit; there will be no other benefit, and there will be a lot of demands, until Joe Average decides that the status quo isn't good enough and stops buying the software with unpleasant EULAs.
The alternative, in any case, is to return the software. You will get your money back (if you make a fuss, and possibly go to the software company), because the software company is not allowed to charge you if you refuse to accept their terms, although they may well try.
It would be a complete waste of time to have such a law.
All you'd get is the same EULA printed on paper and stuck on the outside of the box, and nothing else would change.
Companies selling software will keep selling software with incredibly restrictive EULAs while people keep buying software with incredibly restrictive EULAs. You will never get things to change by pestering law makers, both because you will never have as much clout as the software companies and because you are mostly wrong. If you come into my pub, I can do just about anything on almost any pretext - as long as it's not 'you're black, female, worship the wrong logical fallacy'. I can tell you to sit in the corner facing the wall because you have buttons on your shirt. You can't argue (unless I am willing to let you persuade me). All you can do if you don't like it is leave.
But, if I run a pub and do stupid stuff like that - no-one will drink in my pub, and I'll either go out of business or have to change my attitude.
If you want EULAs not to be incredibly restrictive, then you will have to convince a substantial percentage of the market that these EULAs are a bad thing, so that the software company has to change its EULAs or lose significant amounts of money.
And it is a pretty obvious fact that right now Joe Average does not care what the EULA says, he cares that the software does something like what he wants it to. You are not on a winner here.
It means if you pay a lawyer a moderate amount of money he'll tell you whether it's reasonable or not, and if you pay him a lot of money he'll try to change whether it's reasonable or not.
If you rent a house to someone, you are allowed to write into the tenancy agreement that they may not sub-let. That is legally enforceable, for the good reason that otherwise you come back from your holiday abroad to find your spare room now houses five crack addicts who say they've rented from Joe Bloggs, and Joe Bloggs turns out to have rented it from your original tenant: but you can't kick out the crack addicts without going to court.
In this case, Blizzard would claim that when you buy WoW, what you are paying for is the subscription, i.e. the rent of their service, and the cost of setting up your account on their servers (which they are entitled to charge for, just like a gym charges £10 to register you the first time plus monthly subscription). That isn't even particularly unreasonable: they have to buy x amount of server equipment per new user.
They can't actually stop you selling the CD, box, etc. on, which are yours (unless they've put in the license that you're only leasing these items, which they haven't). They can't stop the buyer running the software on their computer. But they can stop you selling on the key-code and letting the buyer use your account, just like you can't sell your front door key on when you rent a place.
In any case, it's not as if Blizzard is doing this because they want to make money off people who decide they don't like the game, it's to stop the game environment going down the tube per star wars galaxy when people find they can sell game-valuable stuff for real money, which the game economy won't cope with. For example, if the game was 'realistic' you'd need most people to spend 14 hours a day making product, but since no-one would buy a game where you do the same thing every day, 14 hours a day, the economy is fiddled. As soon as game-money becomes real-world valuable, someone will decide it's worth just leaving the game running a bot script to make money, and then people who real-world pay for game-money get all the rare+valuable stuff, and then the prices of those items goes through the roof. And everyone else has to accept that half the cool stuff in the game is now unavailable, and has to put up with far more supermen wandering around killing them for laughs, or they have to spend more real world money on the game. Then Blizzard loses customers because most of the game buyers tell all their mates it's crap / expensive and most of the buyers get pissed off with the game and cancel subscriptions.
The problem is, templating _should_ be an obvious standard thing the OSS should do. But it isn't. When someone can be bothered to write something which does templating properly, works, and lets me push all the simple stuff onto a minimum-wage jr monkey without compromising quality, then suddenly Dreamweaver will be no 2.
PHP does includes. Includes mean server work. Includes all over every single page you have means you need to upgrade your server, which is not cheap.
Dreamweaver templates create the HTML in advance. Pre-created HTML means more storage needed, but no extra processing. Storage is cheap.
For one thing, DW does not put in a huge amount of crap to a page; if you look at a 1k section of HTML output by Word, you can always see immediately that it's not hand-code; that's not true of DW. If you hand-code a page, and it comes out at 50K, then a DW drag and drop version would probably come in around 60K; the extra 10K will be DW putting in a few names, HTML comments, and some attributes in explicitly you'd have left assumed. But it'll generally be about as compliant as hand code.
I agree that it's quicker to hand code an HTML page than to do it in a fluffy semi-WYSIWYG GUI - if I'm using DW, then chances are I am editing the HTML code page not the drag and drop. DW does allow you to do that.
But, if you're not just doing your own website, then you have to think about who will be doing web dev. If it's always going to be you, then fine, do what you want. But it usually isn't, and hiring someone who can do PHP or whatever to hand code is expensive; hiring someone who can be given a ten minute lesson on how they use the DW GUI and don't touch the template is cheap, but if you just want a couple of hundred info pages set up off one or two templates, then you'll probably get the same result. And it will be quicker, being as the server doesn't have to run a parse every single time it serves a page.
On the other hand - $400?! and it still allows your junior monkey to embarrass the company by having a background link to file://..., seems to have some illogical hatred of line breaks and love for paragraphs, and is a pain about swapping templates. And how hard would it be to do resizing images automatically into/images, as opposed to putting the image in, playing with the image tag size until it looks right, going into image editor, resizing to the right size, resave as a different name so you don't lose the original, move it into/images yourself (and remember to tell jr monkey to always do this) and remember to change the image source on your page to the correct one (and find the time jr monkey forgot and left it pointing to file://...).
Re:Not only Google looks for big brains
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Defining Google
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Way to solve this:
Suppose it gets down to 2 pirates. Pirate 2 offers distribution of 100 to him, 0 to 1; he wins because he constitutes 50% of the vote. Pirate 1 does not want this to happen.
If it gets to 3 pirates, suppose pirate 3 offers 99,0,1. Pirate 1 will vote yes, because to vote no would get 3 killed, then 2 will give 1 no money at all. So 2 does not want this.
If you have 4 pirates, then pirate 4 can offer 99,0,1,0; 2 will agree since then he gets 1 (as opposed to none if it gets to 3 people. Neither 1 nor 3 want this.
So pirate 5 can safely offer 98,0,1,0,1.
It's not really easy to say exactly where the Sun stops and 'space' begins - in any case it's certainly further out than the bit you can see from Earth as producing light, which is the 'solar disc'. If you see a total eclipse, you get a good view of the corona - which certainly is part of the Sun - but the gas density doesn't reach 'normal' till you get well out of the Solar System proper, IIRC, but it would sound silly to call stuff that far out part of the Sun.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, but I would imagine that if MS were to put features into Exchange that would send the results of the equivalent of a dirty word search back to them, then they were to target you with advertisements,/. would be thoroughly upbraided.
I think you mean/. would upbraid MS, but anyway...
If MS were to create a version of exchange (or OE) which did that, then target me with ads from it, and I got no return, then I would indeed be pissed off. If on the other hand they created a version of OE which gave them my emails so they could advertise at me, but in return gave me a nice new computer to run the modified version of OE on, after I'd agreed to the deal, then I would not be pissed off.
Heh, well, I've had credit card companies send me credit cards several times without me asking. I've also had them drastically change my rates on me without my permission. I am not "stupid", but I only have so many hours in my day to fight with semi-fraudulent companies who fuck me out of 20 bucks here or there. But now imagine these companies fucking hundreds of thousands of people out of 20 bucks here or there. That's why they do it - many people don't have enough hours in their day to completely and carefully evaluate everything they are sent in the mail, every offer made to them, and so on.
So you're saying some random company sends you a credit card, and you think, hey, I don't have time to check the conditions but what the hell I'll use it anyway?!
And you're then surprised when the small print turned out to be designed to fuck you over?
It's really not so hard to open the letter, see it's offering you a credit card, and bin it. If you actually want a credit card, then you make time to find one that doesn't screw you over, and get that. Usually, that's one which doesn't involve itself in junk mail.
The sieve of Eratosthenes is the usual name for that idea.
You're wrong to think that it's slower than prime factorisation, though. It may look that way if you play with small numbers, but try writing a sieve program to find all primes up to 10,000,000 and a program that does the same by checking the factorisation of each.
I will tell you who cares: modern science in general, nuclear physics, and most notably cryptography
Modern science: not really.
Nuclear physics: my knowledge is fairly limited, but AIUI there probably isn't any way to use the result here. There is some prime theory involved, though.
Crypto: only in so far as it permits a crypto scheme based on twin prime pairs to have infintely many keys; but such a scheme certainly wouldn't be RSA or similar.
Most pure mathematicians are well aware that most of their work isn't going to be any practical use; some (GH Hardy, for example) take some sort of pride in it. It's still interesting.
If it's obvious that there are infinitely many pairs of primes p, p+2, then it's obvious that there are infinitely many pairs of primes p, p+3 for the same reason.
It's quite easy to write a program that will verify any proof written out in formal logic.
The problem is that to write out any proof that isn't really obvious anyway in formal logic requires huge amounts of time and space (think 3000+ pages rather than 38, mainly proving the equivalent of 2+2=4).
There are a few people trying to produce a language for mathematics that a computer can understand and check which isn't quite so completely painful and allows you to quote theorems; but they're still quite messy and most of the theorems you might want to use haven't been included yet.
So people go for the time-honoured method of writing proofs in a way that makes sense to a human, and then having people check the logic by hand. Then you need someone who works in the same field to verify it, because people working in different fields won't know the theorems and would have to spend a year or so learning the background.
The reason people don't want to assume something is true until it's been checked is that if you assume that X's proof of a theorem is valid, and you then produce a 200-page proof of the Riemann Hypothesis which assumes the theorem X said he'd proved, then someone checks X's proof and finds a mistake, your proof also collapses.
OK, suppose you spend 1% of your income on petrol right now. If petrol prices double, which is a hell of a jump, you'll be fine, because it's only 1% of your income more, yes?
Well, actually, no: because when the petrol price goes up it'll cost more to ship everything around; plastic gets more expensive, farmers have to charge more for food, etc.
You probably end up with total costs going up by about 10%, and you're completely screwed, since your employer's costs also go up so he has to cut your salary to fill the gap.
Then since oil prices are essentially set by OPEC, which has been and will probably continue to be short-sighted and profiteering, the chances are that oil prices will jump sharply when they get any sort of justification. Not double, but enough to cause a serious recession: the economy contains a lot of feedback loops.
Today's tip for the future: if you're buying a house you expect to be in in 2020, it should be in a city.
Bollocks.
If you could do it with that small an initial cost, then it would have been done.
Consider that a typical coal-fire power plant produces >300MW per unit; then there are usually 4-8 units in a plant, and you're looking at >1200MW output from the plant.
To replace that with solar cells, say, for |$1m, you'd need to be able to get 1200W out of $1 worth of solar cell, which isn't even close to today's prices: and that neglects the cost of building the structure around the cells.
As far as wind and tide goes - you need some serious engineering just to cover the area in which 1200MW of power is available, and you'd be lucky to get the concrete in place for $1m, let alone the power generation equipment.
University students may be clever, but being one myself I know very well we're not that sharp; if well paid graduates on design groups can't solve a problem in several years of work, then chances are random students won't solve it either.
If you shove the initial cost up to more like $1bn, though, and ignore the enviro-nut complaints about how it looks bad, kills fish, disrupts the natural karma of the planet, or whatever, then you can replace a conventional power plant with renewable sources on a low maintenance budget. If you happen to be living in a convenient area (like Iceland) then you can do considerably better with a geothermal plant, too.
How long do nuclear power plants take to produce energy from the moment that you press the big red button?
Several days: nuclear plants are designed to maximise the lifespan of the components around and in the reactor, because repair is a serious operation. That means minimising heat stresses; so nuclear plants are warmed up very slowly to operating temperatures, and usually left on as long as possible once they get there.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'database' idea you suggest has the following problems: first, every company uses different terms, so every EULA you read will trigger 'different terms' flag in your database. Unless you can find a way to catch only 'outrageous' terms, even when companies are trying to slip such things through your filter. If you can do that, please apply it to spam filtering, and maybe to developing a properly Turing-capable AI.
This means that the user still gets shown an EULA every time they install software, just like now.
Second, software companies want to screw you with EULAs. Why are they going to cooperate with your device whose purpose is to make it hard?
Third, you are not just asking software companies to cooperate with a device whose sole purpose is to make it harder for them to screw you over, you are asking _them_ to pay _you_ for the privilege. That's like asking a guy walking the streets with a SWAG bag over his shoulder to give you £10 towards the costs of a burglar alarm. Before you suggest that there should be a law, you won't get a law without public support or lots of money; if you have public support then EULAs will be less restrictive because otherwise no-one would buy the software, and you do not have lots of money: you are not a big software company.
Fourth, the 'savings in frictionless commmerce' would be miniscule. Most people do simply click through EULAs, as you say. That won't be made any quicker by the standardised thing. Most people don't ever breach the EULA, either, and those that do mostly don't get caught.
So, when would your idea save money? It would do so when someone like me installed something, because I do read EULAs. On the other hand, that would be about an hour in the last year, and most of that was EULAs of games - which I install in my own free time, commercial value zero. So at best £10 per person who reads EULAs per year. Maybe £100,000. Being optimistic. When else would it save time or money? Never. EULA enforcement won't change. If you don't like the terms you still have to spend the time trying to return the thing just like before.
In other words, you have come up with a solution to a problem which addresses all the technical aspects pretty well, but just assumes the social aspects work the way you want them to. They don't.
It's like designing a cheap machine to stop rapes, which consists of a little ring which blokes put over their cocks, plus a bit of hardware which detects the distance between the cock and an appropriate orifice, and triggers when it reaches zero, except in the cases where the other person wants it (which it gets right every time), and controls for accidental bumps (again it is perfect) which aren't an attempted rape, et cetera. When it triggers the ring contracts and cuts the bloke's cock off.
So, perfect solution technically - stops all rapes, has no false positives, but would never be used by any significant fraction of the public: hopefully that's obvious?
I've never read the actual text of the law that says I am not allowed to commit murder. Nor have most people. In fact, most people have never read most laws. Does that mean we can all ignore them too?
You seem to think most people read the small print on financial contracts. If you bother to check, you'll find this is not true. For example, if you are buying some piece of kit, you can buy it now for £120, or pay nothing for six months then 12 easy monthly £9.99 payments. Not very uncommon, and a lot of people look at the two options and go for the latter without ever reading the small print. The small print will tell you that you are responsible for ensuring all the payments get to the company on time, miss them and you will be raped.
But the company makes a shedload of money off those contracts, because a lot of people forget, or don't worry too much about it, and find themselves getting hit by large penalties. Which they did not know about because they did not read the small print.
Your typical EULA comes up on a page with a Next button which you can't press until you find the checkbox which says 'I have read and agree to this'. Some of them even check that you've actually scrolled through the whole document before allowing you to go on. If you do not read the EULA, then it is not because you have forgotten, or you didn't know you had to, it is because you were too lazy. On-line, about all you could do to make it even more clear to people that they have to read the thing is to require them to type the text 'I have read and agree', and all that would do is penalise people who can't spell, lazy guys would still type it without reading.
As to reasonable expectations.. the company will let you use the software if you agree, if you don't you can't use the software. As long as people keep buying software with those terms, then companies will keep those terms. In other words, the reason you are being forced into these restrictive EULAs is that Joe Average doesn't mind. If you want better terms, put the company in a position where it has to offer better terms or lose sales (and just yours doesn't count, one person is insignificant). Go out and convince Joe Average not to buy software with restrictive EULAs, or accept them as they are now.
See my comments on your database idea - short terms, it's not going to work.
If you and I sign a contract, and then I come along next week with another contract, you don't have to sign it. If anything in it contradicts the original contract, we can't sign it until we break the original. But as long as nothing contradicts, if you sign it you are bound by both. If you don't like it that's tough, you signed.
If an MMORPG EULA changes, then either there is a contradiction between the old and new versions, in which case you can't sign (legally, even if you accept it's void). If there is no discrepancy, and you agree, then you are bound by all the new conditions.
If the 'original' EULA guarantees you nothing, which in this case, like most, is pretty much true, then chances are any changed version is something you can sign without a contradiction. IOW, if you don't agree to the new EULA, you can't continue to play. No in-between option is required. The only thing you get is that if you have paid in advance for a month (or other time period), they must allow you to continue playing, with the old contract, for the rest of the month (or other time period). Possibly they might be able to word the original contract so that if they issue a new contract which you do not agree to then they can refund your money on the time you haven't used and kick you off now, debatable.
In order:
The parent or guardian of the minor is responsible (but you'd probably get out of it in court if you could show you never knew about the software).
If you don't like the EULA, then the store can refuse to return your money, the company can't. They can require you to pay the shipping charge for all the stuff you bought, but once they have the bought stuff they must return your money. This will not stop them being obstructionist, but at worst, if you produce court papers they will settle.
If you bypassed the EULA, that's probably a DMCA violation now. In any case, if you knew it existed then you will lose in court. You can only win if you can convince the jury that you just happened by accident to run the software in such a way that the EULA never showed. Chances are that you lose when the software company says 'the install script runs as soon as you put the disc in the drive, and it displays the EULA. This person deliberately bypassed it, hence they knew the EULA existed and were trying to avoid seeing it.'. Whatever, morally if you know there is an agreement which you must accept to run the software, you should not try to bypass it. If the software is so incredibly badly written that it can genuinely fail to show the EULA in normal situations, OTOH, the software company will not get its EULA rights.
If you do not agree to the EULA, then you can do what you like for private (non-commercial) purposes. Copyright does not mean you cannot copy. It means you cannot copy and sell, distribute, etc. You are bound by it without ever agreeing to anything - you are bound by copyright as soon as the software company burns a master disc, perhaps before you've ever heard of the product, let alone bought it.
Once you own the disc, you can do what you like, break copy protection, modify it, disassemble it, whatever. But you are not allowed to let anyone know about it, and you are not allowed to create derivative works and sell, distribute, etc. them. Basically, restrictions on what you can do like that, although they're in the EULA, are either already covered by copyright (if you don't keep it private) or not legally binding and in any case unenforceable (if you do keep it private, no-one can find that you've ignored the restrictions).
Comment: if you want to change EULAs, then the law is useless, you must try to persuade Joe Average that a restrictive EULA means he shouldn't buy the software, then the company will issue less restrictive EULAs. If on the other hand you want to change copyright status of software (per ESR) then you need to get the law changed. Currently people seem to be trying to get the law on EULAs changed and convince Joe Public that software should be free. Which is the wrong way about.
If you don't read the EULA, then you deserve to suffer if it says something you don't like.
Just like you deserve to suffer, and I will laugh at you, if you sign up for a loan with nice figures in big writing on the front but don't bother reading the small print where it says that the slightest misstep will result in being raped massively.
It is _not_ like a deaf person signing terms of a contract at a person who does not know sign language, then tricking them into shaking hands to 'seal' it (which isn't legally binding anyway). You know perfectly well the EULA is a contract, the button you click to move on tells you that you must have read and agreed, and you decided not to bother. You are exactly as stupid as the guy who finds himself tied into unpleasant loan terms because he decided not to bother reading the small print.
I think I might write a bit of software to do something minor and vaguely useful, or perhaps just pretty, plus a phone home on install just to see how many people do install it, and stick in an EULA containing something like 'This software contains a script which finds all email addresses used on this computer and bypasses all forms of mail filtering on many common email clients. You agree to allow $me to send mail, including advertisements, to any and all of the email addresses found, in perpetuity'. Which would be totally legal; and is, quite explicitly, a license to spam you into oblivion until you get the script off the computer and get new email addresses. And of course, when a guy like you can't be bothered to read the EULA, it will be entirely your fault for being an idiot.
And the answer to the question, 'what is the benefit to the end user in signing the EULA' is that the end user gets to use the software. There is no other benefit; there will be no other benefit, and there will be a lot of demands, until Joe Average decides that the status quo isn't good enough and stops buying the software with unpleasant EULAs.
The alternative, in any case, is to return the software. You will get your money back (if you make a fuss, and possibly go to the software company), because the software company is not allowed to charge you if you refuse to accept their terms, although they may well try.
It would be a complete waste of time to have such a law.
All you'd get is the same EULA printed on paper and stuck on the outside of the box, and nothing else would change.
Companies selling software will keep selling software with incredibly restrictive EULAs while people keep buying software with incredibly restrictive EULAs. You will never get things to change by pestering law makers, both because you will never have as much clout as the software companies and because you are mostly wrong. If you come into my pub, I can do just about anything on almost any pretext - as long as it's not 'you're black, female, worship the wrong logical fallacy'. I can tell you to sit in the corner facing the wall because you have buttons on your shirt. You can't argue (unless I am willing to let you persuade me). All you can do if you don't like it is leave.
But, if I run a pub and do stupid stuff like that - no-one will drink in my pub, and I'll either go out of business or have to change my attitude.
If you want EULAs not to be incredibly restrictive, then you will have to convince a substantial percentage of the market that these EULAs are a bad thing, so that the software company has to change its EULAs or lose significant amounts of money.
And it is a pretty obvious fact that right now Joe Average does not care what the EULA says, he cares that the software does something like what he wants it to. You are not on a winner here.
It means if you pay a lawyer a moderate amount of money he'll tell you whether it's reasonable or not, and if you pay him a lot of money he'll try to change whether it's reasonable or not.
Look at it this way.
If you rent a house to someone, you are allowed to write into the tenancy agreement that they may not sub-let. That is legally enforceable, for the good reason that otherwise you come back from your holiday abroad to find your spare room now houses five crack addicts who say they've rented from Joe Bloggs, and Joe Bloggs turns out to have rented it from your original tenant: but you can't kick out the crack addicts without going to court.
In this case, Blizzard would claim that when you buy WoW, what you are paying for is the subscription, i.e. the rent of their service, and the cost of setting up your account on their servers (which they are entitled to charge for, just like a gym charges £10 to register you the first time plus monthly subscription). That isn't even particularly unreasonable: they have to buy x amount of server equipment per new user.
They can't actually stop you selling the CD, box, etc. on, which are yours (unless they've put in the license that you're only leasing these items, which they haven't). They can't stop the buyer running the software on their computer. But they can stop you selling on the key-code and letting the buyer use your account, just like you can't sell your front door key on when you rent a place.
In any case, it's not as if Blizzard is doing this because they want to make money off people who decide they don't like the game, it's to stop the game environment going down the tube per star wars galaxy when people find they can sell game-valuable stuff for real money, which the game economy won't cope with. For example, if the game was 'realistic' you'd need most people to spend 14 hours a day making product, but since no-one would buy a game where you do the same thing every day, 14 hours a day, the economy is fiddled. As soon as game-money becomes real-world valuable, someone will decide it's worth just leaving the game running a bot script to make money, and then people who real-world pay for game-money get all the rare+valuable stuff, and then the prices of those items goes through the roof. And everyone else has to accept that half the cool stuff in the game is now unavailable, and has to put up with far more supermen wandering around killing them for laughs, or they have to spend more real world money on the game. Then Blizzard loses customers because most of the game buyers tell all their mates it's crap / expensive and most of the buyers get pissed off with the game and cancel subscriptions.
The problem is, templating _should_ be an obvious standard thing the OSS should do. But it isn't. When someone can be bothered to write something which does templating properly, works, and lets me push all the simple stuff onto a minimum-wage jr monkey without compromising quality, then suddenly Dreamweaver will be no 2.
PHP does includes. Includes mean server work. Includes all over every single page you have means you need to upgrade your server, which is not cheap.
Dreamweaver templates create the HTML in advance. Pre-created HTML means more storage needed, but no extra processing. Storage is cheap.
Dreamweaver =/= MS Word HTML.
/images, as opposed to putting the image in, playing with the image tag size until it looks right, going into image editor, resizing to the right size, resave as a different name so you don't lose the original, move it into /images yourself (and remember to tell jr monkey to always do this) and remember to change the image source on your page to the correct one (and find the time jr monkey forgot and left it pointing to file://...).
For one thing, DW does not put in a huge amount of crap to a page; if you look at a 1k section of HTML output by Word, you can always see immediately that it's not hand-code; that's not true of DW. If you hand-code a page, and it comes out at 50K, then a DW drag and drop version would probably come in around 60K; the extra 10K will be DW putting in a few names, HTML comments, and some attributes in explicitly you'd have left assumed. But it'll generally be about as compliant as hand code.
I agree that it's quicker to hand code an HTML page than to do it in a fluffy semi-WYSIWYG GUI - if I'm using DW, then chances are I am editing the HTML code page not the drag and drop. DW does allow you to do that.
But, if you're not just doing your own website, then you have to think about who will be doing web dev. If it's always going to be you, then fine, do what you want. But it usually isn't, and hiring someone who can do PHP or whatever to hand code is expensive; hiring someone who can be given a ten minute lesson on how they use the DW GUI and don't touch the template is cheap, but if you just want a couple of hundred info pages set up off one or two templates, then you'll probably get the same result. And it will be quicker, being as the server doesn't have to run a parse every single time it serves a page.
On the other hand - $400?! and it still allows your junior monkey to embarrass the company by having a background link to file://..., seems to have some illogical hatred of line breaks and love for paragraphs, and is a pain about swapping templates. And how hard would it be to do resizing images automatically into
Way to solve this: Suppose it gets down to 2 pirates. Pirate 2 offers distribution of 100 to him, 0 to 1; he wins because he constitutes 50% of the vote. Pirate 1 does not want this to happen. If it gets to 3 pirates, suppose pirate 3 offers 99,0,1. Pirate 1 will vote yes, because to vote no would get 3 killed, then 2 will give 1 no money at all. So 2 does not want this. If you have 4 pirates, then pirate 4 can offer 99,0,1,0; 2 will agree since then he gets 1 (as opposed to none if it gets to 3 people. Neither 1 nor 3 want this. So pirate 5 can safely offer 98,0,1,0,1.
Do you have any dirty secrets I can use to ensure pay rise / un-fire-ability?
Please explain why you are permitted to assume R is a set in the formalism you give.
It's not really easy to say exactly where the Sun stops and 'space' begins - in any case it's certainly further out than the bit you can see from Earth as producing light, which is the 'solar disc'.
If you see a total eclipse, you get a good view of the corona - which certainly is part of the Sun - but the gas density doesn't reach 'normal' till you get well out of the Solar System proper, IIRC, but it would sound silly to call stuff that far out part of the Sun.
Well, if you were worried about your privacy, then why send me an email? I'm only going to post it to usenet and take the piss, as is my right.
If MS were to create a version of exchange (or OE) which did that, then target me with ads from it, and I got no return, then I would indeed be pissed off.
If on the other hand they created a version of OE which gave them my emails so they could advertise at me, but in return gave me a nice new computer to run the modified version of OE on, after I'd agreed to the deal, then I would not be pissed off.
And you're then surprised when the small print turned out to be designed to fuck you over?
It's really not so hard to open the letter, see it's offering you a credit card, and bin it. If you actually want a credit card, then you make time to find one that doesn't screw you over, and get that. Usually, that's one which doesn't involve itself in junk mail.
The sieve of Eratosthenes is the usual name for that idea.
You're wrong to think that it's slower than prime factorisation, though. It may look that way if you play with small numbers, but try writing a sieve program to find all primes up to 10,000,000 and a program that does the same by checking the factorisation of each.
Nuclear physics: my knowledge is fairly limited, but AIUI there probably isn't any way to use the result here. There is some prime theory involved, though.
Crypto: only in so far as it permits a crypto scheme based on twin prime pairs to have infintely many keys; but such a scheme certainly wouldn't be RSA or similar.
Most pure mathematicians are well aware that most of their work isn't going to be any practical use; some (GH Hardy, for example) take some sort of pride in it. It's still interesting.
Anyone who isn't a number theorist, probably. And even then you'd probably need to be looking at analytic number theory not algebraic.
If it's obvious that there are infinitely many pairs of primes p, p+2, then it's obvious that there are infinitely many pairs of primes p, p+3 for the same reason.
Except there's only one pair like that.
It's quite easy to write a program that will verify any proof written out in formal logic.
The problem is that to write out any proof that isn't really obvious anyway in formal logic requires huge amounts of time and space (think 3000+ pages rather than 38, mainly proving the equivalent of 2+2=4).
There are a few people trying to produce a language for mathematics that a computer can understand and check which isn't quite so completely painful and allows you to quote theorems; but they're still quite messy and most of the theorems you might want to use haven't been included yet.
So people go for the time-honoured method of writing proofs in a way that makes sense to a human, and then having people check the logic by hand. Then you need someone who works in the same field to verify it, because people working in different fields won't know the theorems and would have to spend a year or so learning the background.
The reason people don't want to assume something is true until it's been checked is that if you assume that X's proof of a theorem is valid, and you then produce a 200-page proof of the Riemann Hypothesis which assumes the theorem X said he'd proved, then someone checks X's proof and finds a mistake, your proof also collapses.
OK, suppose you spend 1% of your income on petrol right now. If petrol prices double, which is a hell of a jump, you'll be fine, because it's only 1% of your income more, yes?
Well, actually, no: because when the petrol price goes up it'll cost more to ship everything around; plastic gets more expensive, farmers have to charge more for food, etc.
You probably end up with total costs going up by about 10%, and you're completely screwed, since your employer's costs also go up so he has to cut your salary to fill the gap.
Then since oil prices are essentially set by OPEC, which has been and will probably continue to be short-sighted and profiteering, the chances are that oil prices will jump sharply when they get any sort of justification. Not double, but enough to cause a serious recession: the economy contains a lot of feedback loops.
Today's tip for the future: if you're buying a house you expect to be in in 2020, it should be in a city.
Bollocks.
If you could do it with that small an initial cost, then it would have been done.
Consider that a typical coal-fire power plant produces >300MW per unit; then there are usually 4-8 units in a plant, and you're looking at >1200MW output from the plant.
To replace that with solar cells, say, for |$1m, you'd need to be able to get 1200W out of $1 worth of solar cell, which isn't even close to today's prices: and that neglects the cost of building the structure around the cells.
As far as wind and tide goes - you need some serious engineering just to cover the area in which 1200MW of power is available, and you'd be lucky to get the concrete in place for $1m, let alone the power generation equipment.
University students may be clever, but being one myself I know very well we're not that sharp; if well paid graduates on design groups can't solve a problem in several years of work, then chances are random students won't solve it either.
If you shove the initial cost up to more like $1bn, though, and ignore the enviro-nut complaints about how it looks bad, kills fish, disrupts the natural karma of the planet, or whatever, then you can replace a conventional power plant with renewable sources on a low maintenance budget. If you happen to be living in a convenient area (like Iceland) then you can do considerably better with a geothermal plant, too.