That's the point. The electronic agent isn't capable of interpreting the the contract, modified or not, so there is no accepting of the contract, valid or not.
Imagine a company hired a human of limited mental capacity to be a contract agent and then argued that they aren't bound by their agent's mistakes because no-one could possibly think that their agent could understand the contract. I don't think any judge would accept the company's argument that they have no liability because they hired a moron.
I don't think the average American has any idea what Microsoft's electronic agents are capable of,
so side argument would be to show state of the art AI's that might be able to understand simple contract changes, and argue that since such are available, Microsoft, the richest software company in the world, should be using those.
Contracts can be modified before they are signed
on
UK Report Slams EULAs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you are presented with a contract by a company, you can cross out sections of the contract that you can't live with. If the company's agent accepts that contract, they are bound by it. (subject to vagaries of contract law)
If I were to write a utility that would allow me to electronically cross out sections of an electronic EULA, and then the program (the owner's agent) accepted that modified EULA, would both parties be bound by the new contract? What if my utility allowed me to add sections as well. i.e. If this MS program crashed, MS will pay me $1,000,000
Most EULAs will allow you to print them before accepting them. I could make the same modifications to the paper copy as well. Even if there was a pre-clause that said the EULA couldn't be modified, I could cross that out too.
If you are presented with a contract by a company, you can cross out sections of the contract that you can't live with. If the company's agent accepts that contract, they are bound by it. (subject to vagaries of contract law)
If I were to write a utility that would allow me to electronically cross out sections of an electronic EULA, and then the program (the owner's agent) accepted that modified EULA, would both parties be bound by the new contract? What if my utility allowed me to add sections as well. i.e. If this MS program crashed, MS will pay me $1,000,000
Most EULAs will allow you to print them before accepting them. I could make the same modifications to the paper copy as well. Even if there was a pre-clause that said the EULA couldn't be modified, I could cross that out too.
So would such a program mean the end of EULAs as we know them? Would software publishers have to fall back to straight copyright and save the legal mumbo-jumbo?
My experience is that these days, that kind of thing tends to be much more expensive and inefficient that simply putting pdfs on the web.
Absolutely, but when I started school, there was one class that was still using punchcards. The web had only been dreamed of.
In this century, yes, it's best to keep everything in electronic form, so it can be searched and updated properly. Kudos for thinking about your students.
People publish what they know. Not too many people know squat about mosquito control in third world contries, so they create what they can.
This is not a bad thing, but I can see your point about all this stuff masking what is really needed.
As far as stuff being published mostly in English. The text will best be translated by a native speaker who also knows English. Since the OLPC is networked, the translated texts can make it to where they are needed.
What's needed are the professors and students to do this. So of the best textbooks I had in college were published through the University printing department for the cost of materials.
I took a course in Technical Business Writing for where as a final project we had to write a real manual for an existing product. That sort of class could easily churn out several good textbooks a semester.
I sure the human high jump record is without touching the top. When my dog jumps an obstacle, she jumps so that her front legs touch, and she uses the obstacle to push off of.
Personally, I draw the line 18 years after birth. (Don't laugh, in Colonial America, fathers could kill their sons up the the 18th birthday)
Anyway, if you don't know where to draw the line, but you draw it anyway, you're pretty much guaranteed to draw it in the wrong place. We can arbitrarily set standards like when the heart starts to beat or when the spine is more that N cm, but to set a time standard assumes that we can even know when conception happened.
B.t.w. Find some parents who have lost a baby to miscarriage at any point in the process and see if they classify it as a "blob".
Could this be used to build immunity to viruses? Imagine sequences are inserted into the places on DNA where viruses normally bind. If those sequences are no-ops, or duplicate the function of the sequences they replace, the organism would still be viable, but the viruses would have a hard time replicating.
Au Contrare moosebreath. I've had several of these, including one like you had. But, another one has a detachable probe, and a piece of Americium 241 on the side for testing. It can easily detect the radiation from a 1 cm3 chunk of uranium ore, or from '30s era uranium glass.
They don't keep backups of email because they don't want them subpoenaed. If all the email is on-line they can do a simple search in response to a court order. If they have a library of tape backups, they have to go through a lot of tapes to make sure the requested data isn't one one. (I speak from experience, I've had to keep obsolete email systems running so that auditors can access email sent many years ago)
That said, in that environment, they should never be deleting, but instead marking stuff for deletion so that the user can't access it. If no-one complains after a few weeks, an automated process can do the real deletion.
That's why most providers *don't* keep email backups on tape. When they get subpoenaed, they can just say, "It's gone." There's no law for ISPs saying they have to keep backups of email. (For corporations regarding corporate email, there is.)
I know many people are saying that Charter should have backed up the email, but I used to work for AOL, and I know they don't back up any of the email, other than having redundant servers in multiple locations. By not sending your email to tape or other media, they can't be hauled into court and forced to give it up. Once it's gone, it's gone.
That said, it's standard practice when deleting an account to mark the data as deleted, so that it looks like it's gone to the user, but it's actually pending deletion later. Then, when someone complains or pays their bill, you can restore what was "deleted." After a predetermined amount of time, if you don't complain, a cleanup script deletes it permenently.
I wish companies would relize that supporting old products is good for the botton line. What would happen to Ford, if you couldn't buy a critical part for your 10 year old car. Some car companies have sold their tools and dies to smaller companies that manufacture parts for 50 year old cars, because it's good advertizing to have 50yo antique cars around.
To continue your conversation:
Customer: Ok, no thanks. I'll check out your competition and get back to you. Maybe mythtv is good enough now...
Also, even after analog over the air broadcasts are stopped, you can still eBay your analog machine to someone who gets cable.
You can sign up for the coupons, but the converter aren't available yet... Also I'd like to know if Tivo will support one or more of the converters. I have an analog Tivo with lifetime subscription. I'll be mighty pissed if they don't support a digital converter using an IR blaster like they do with Satellite converters.
Cool. Now who has a spare botnet, is willing to wade through this arsehole's source, and is willing to send garbage values to al-brain@hotmail.fr and albrain08@yahoo.fr?
I would hope that would be the security guys at abbey.co.uk, bankofamerica.com, cahoot.co.uk, chase.com, egold.com, ebay.com, hsbc,co.uk, lloydstsb.com, moneybookers.com, nationwide.co.uk, nbk.com.kw, paypal.com, regions.com, stgeorge.com.au, wachovia.com and westernunion.com.
All they have to do is send some trogan card numbers that "work", but are quickly traceable. Then send the cops to the addresses that the crooks are sending stuff to, or catch them at the store where they try to use the CC number.
While this is an urban legend, several legislatures have proposed requiring banks to have PIN "Panic Codes". http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/pinalert.asp
In the case of palindromic codes, just flip them inside out. i.e. 1221 becomes 2112.
A technological solution could be to partition it similar to airspace for airplanes. A land based transceiver would query an FCC server saying "I have N bytes I need to get to location XXX YYY, and the FCC server would see if anyone else was using bandwidth in that direction. You'd get a responce back saying either wait N seconds, or send your data on ZZZ MHz, using WWW watts, in direction EEE. After you sent your data, the lanes would be cleared for a response, then someone else could use that bandwidth.
If a mobile transceiver needed to contact the base station, it would listen for clear air, then send a standardized packet so the the base station could request bandwidth. If there was a collision, just use collision backoff algorithms like ethernet.
At the end of the day, the FCC would send everyone a bill for the bandwidth used. The cost would just around what the system costs to administer. They could charge people more during periods of congestion, and steep discounts when the system is quiet.
They're not arguing what the law is, the arguement is more about how to clarify the law.
When I was growing up, (we had dinosaurs for pets), it was *understood*, that any amount of copying, as long as you didn't sell it, was ok. While, technically, copying a friend's album to a tape was illegal, nobody had ever been prosecuted for it, and the authorities had no intention of *ever* prosecuting anyone for making a mix tape from albums they didn't personally own. People who sold bootlegs were occasionally busted, but I remember record stores openly selling bootleg albums that weren't for sale in the states.
A good programmer will try to refactor the bullshit out of your business processes. If you, Mr. Businessman, *are* the bullshit, you want to stay as far away from good & great programmers as possible.
Most states offer non-driver's IDs that are just like licenses, but you can't use them to drive with.
I'm sure passports would be REAL ID compliant.
The more important question:
You've just be summoned by a judge to appear in federal court X soon. You don't have a REAL ID, or have just lost yours, and it takes awhile to get a new one. What do you do?
I have a driverless lawn mower. Most of the time I just send it into the yard, and press the go button and it does the rest. If it gets stuck, or I need to mow a part that's outside it's perimeter, I just pull the control panel off the top and guide it using a joypad like I was controling a video game.
There's no way they'd build, or anyone would buy a vehicle without a control override. Imagine this though. With a normal car, you have to keep some attention on the road, limiting your view of the scenery. With this car, you could put it into a mode where you are controlling the direction, but the AI keeps the car from running into lamppoles, bicycles and errant turtles in the road. You'd be able to let your attention wander, and yes you'd be able to find the deer. However this car would be less likey to run them over. (I live in Northern Virginia, and deer/car collisions are a *big* problem.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's the point. The electronic agent isn't capable of interpreting the the contract, modified or not, so there is no accepting of the contract, valid or not.
Imagine a company hired a human of limited mental capacity to be a contract agent and then argued that they aren't bound by their agent's mistakes because no-one could possibly think that their agent could understand the contract. I don't think any judge would accept the company's argument that they have no liability because they hired a moron.
I don't think the average American has any idea what Microsoft's electronic agents are capable of, so side argument would be to show state of the art AI's that might be able to understand simple contract changes, and argue that since such are available, Microsoft, the richest software company in the world, should be using those.
If you are presented with a contract by a company, you can cross out sections of the contract that you can't live with. If the company's agent accepts that contract, they are bound by it. (subject to vagaries of contract law)
If I were to write a utility that would allow me to electronically cross out sections of an electronic EULA, and then the program (the owner's agent) accepted that modified EULA, would both parties be bound by the new contract? What if my utility allowed me to add sections as well. i.e. If this MS program crashed, MS will pay me $1,000,000
Most EULAs will allow you to print them before accepting them. I could make the same modifications to the paper copy as well. Even if there was a pre-clause that said the EULA couldn't be modified, I could cross that out too.
If you are presented with a contract by a company, you can cross out sections of the contract that you can't live with. If the company's agent accepts that contract, they are bound by it. (subject to vagaries of contract law)
If I were to write a utility that would allow me to electronically cross out sections of an electronic EULA, and then the program (the owner's agent) accepted that modified EULA, would both parties be bound by the new contract? What if my utility allowed me to add sections as well. i.e. If this MS program crashed, MS will pay me $1,000,000
Most EULAs will allow you to print them before accepting them. I could make the same modifications to the paper copy as well. Even if there was a pre-clause that said the EULA couldn't be modified, I could cross that out too.
So would such a program mean the end of EULAs as we know them? Would software publishers have to fall back to straight copyright and save the legal mumbo-jumbo?
In this century, yes, it's best to keep everything in electronic form, so it can be searched and updated properly. Kudos for thinking about your students.
People publish what they know. Not too many people know squat about mosquito control in third world contries, so they create what they can.
This is not a bad thing, but I can see your point about all this stuff masking what is really needed.
As far as stuff being published mostly in English. The text will best be translated by a native speaker who also knows English. Since the OLPC is networked, the translated texts can make it to where they are needed.
What's needed are the professors and students to do this. So of the best textbooks I had in college were published through the University printing department for the cost of materials.
I took a course in Technical Business Writing for where as a final project we had to write a real manual for an existing product. That sort of class could easily churn out several good textbooks a semester.
I'm surprised no-one's mentioned Journeyman. It's got time-travel and babes, and time-traveling babes.
Wow, you've hit on a great idea. What if someone won a Darwin award AND an ignoble in the same event?
I sure the human high jump record is without touching the top. When my dog jumps an obstacle, she jumps so that her front legs touch, and she uses the obstacle to push off of.
Personally, I draw the line 18 years after birth. (Don't laugh, in Colonial America, fathers could kill their sons up the the 18th birthday)
Anyway, if you don't know where to draw the line, but you draw it anyway, you're pretty much guaranteed to draw it in the wrong place. We can arbitrarily set standards like when the heart starts to beat or when the spine is more that N cm, but to set a time standard assumes that we can even know when conception happened.
B.t.w. Find some parents who have lost a baby to miscarriage at any point in the process and see if they classify it as a "blob".
Could this be used to build immunity to viruses? Imagine sequences are inserted into the places on DNA where viruses normally bind. If those sequences are no-ops, or duplicate the function of the sequences they replace, the organism would still be viable, but the viruses would have a hard time replicating.
Au Contrare moosebreath. I've had several of these, including one like you had. But, another one has a detachable probe, and a piece of Americium 241 on the side for testing. It can easily detect the radiation from a 1 cm3 chunk of uranium ore, or from '30s era uranium glass.
They don't keep backups of email because they don't want them subpoenaed. If all the email is on-line they can do a simple search in response to a court order. If they have a library of tape backups, they have to go through a lot of tapes to make sure the requested data isn't one one. (I speak from experience, I've had to keep obsolete email systems running so that auditors can access email sent many years ago)
That said, in that environment, they should never be deleting, but instead marking stuff for deletion so that the user can't access it. If no-one complains after a few weeks, an automated process can do the real deletion.
That's why most providers *don't* keep email backups on tape. When they get subpoenaed, they can just say, "It's gone." There's no law for ISPs saying they have to keep backups of email. (For corporations regarding corporate email, there is.)
I know many people are saying that Charter should have backed up the email, but I used to work for AOL, and I know they don't back up any of the email, other than having redundant servers in multiple locations. By not sending your email to tape or other media, they can't be hauled into court and forced to give it up. Once it's gone, it's gone.
That said, it's standard practice when deleting an account to mark the data as deleted, so that it looks like it's gone to the user, but it's actually pending deletion later. Then, when someone complains or pays their bill, you can restore what was "deleted." After a predetermined amount of time, if you don't complain, a cleanup script deletes it permenently.
I wish companies would relize that supporting old products is good for the botton line. What would happen to Ford, if you couldn't buy a critical part for your 10 year old car. Some car companies have sold their tools and dies to smaller companies that manufacture parts for 50 year old cars, because it's good advertizing to have 50yo antique cars around.
To continue your conversation:
Customer: Ok, no thanks. I'll check out your competition and get back to you. Maybe mythtv is good enough now...
Also, even after analog over the air broadcasts are stopped, you can still eBay your analog machine to someone who gets cable.
You can sign up for the coupons, but the converter aren't available yet... Also I'd like to know if Tivo will support one or more of the converters. I have an analog Tivo with lifetime subscription. I'll be mighty pissed if they don't support a digital converter using an IR blaster like they do with Satellite converters.
All they have to do is send some trogan card numbers that "work", but are quickly traceable. Then send the cops to the addresses that the crooks are sending stuff to, or catch them at the store where they try to use the CC number.
While this is an urban legend, several legislatures have proposed requiring banks to have PIN "Panic Codes". http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/pinalert.asp
In the case of palindromic codes, just flip them inside out. i.e. 1221 becomes 2112.
A technological solution could be to partition it similar to airspace for airplanes. A land based transceiver would query an FCC server saying "I have N bytes I need to get to location XXX YYY, and the FCC server would see if anyone else was using bandwidth in that direction. You'd get a responce back saying either wait N seconds, or send your data on ZZZ MHz, using WWW watts, in direction EEE. After you sent your data, the lanes would be cleared for a response, then someone else could use that bandwidth.
If a mobile transceiver needed to contact the base station, it would listen for clear air, then send a standardized packet so the the base station could request bandwidth. If there was a collision, just use collision backoff algorithms like ethernet.
At the end of the day, the FCC would send everyone a bill for the bandwidth used. The cost would just around what the system costs to administer. They could charge people more during periods of congestion, and steep discounts when the system is quiet.
They're not arguing what the law is, the arguement is more about how to clarify the law.
When I was growing up, (we had dinosaurs for pets), it was *understood*, that any amount of copying, as long as you didn't sell it, was ok. While, technically, copying a friend's album to a tape was illegal, nobody had ever been prosecuted for it, and the authorities had no intention of *ever* prosecuting anyone for making a mix tape from albums they didn't personally own. People who sold bootlegs were occasionally busted, but I remember record stores openly selling bootleg albums that weren't for sale in the states.
A good programmer will try to refactor the bullshit out of your business processes. If you, Mr. Businessman, *are* the bullshit, you want to stay as far away from good & great programmers as possible.
Most states offer non-driver's IDs that are just like licenses, but you can't use them to drive with. I'm sure passports would be REAL ID compliant.
The more important question:
You've just be summoned by a judge to appear in federal court X soon. You don't have a REAL ID, or have just lost yours, and it takes awhile to get a new one. What do you do?
I have a driverless lawn mower. Most of the time I just send it into the yard, and press the go button and it does the rest. If it gets stuck, or I need to mow a part that's outside it's perimeter, I just pull the control panel off the top and guide it using a joypad like I was controling a video game.
There's no way they'd build, or anyone would buy a vehicle without a control override. Imagine this though. With a normal car, you have to keep some attention on the road, limiting your view of the scenery. With this car, you could put it into a mode where you are controlling the direction, but the AI keeps the car from running into lamppoles, bicycles and errant turtles in the road. You'd be able to let your attention wander, and yes you'd be able to find the deer. However this car would be less likey to run them over. (I live in Northern Virginia, and deer/car collisions are a *big* problem.)