I don't buy into this non-sense. I'm not buying into Google's terms and conditions. If they sold a product the consumer has the right of resale regardless of what was in the terms of service. You can put whatever you like in a TOS and that doesn't make it legal.
"The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner."
Actually, you seem to be right, but the appropriate citation would be Bobbs-Merrill Co. Vs Straus, which established the doctrine of first sale in the context of wholesale agreements. Indeed, no law was broken.
If nothing illegal was done here...what's the problem?
As I've just commented above, maybe the law was broken. There is a huge difference in law between a retail contract and a business-to-business contract and the related rights. Google's Ts&Cs say no "commercial resale", specifically because they know that they can't ban private resale. But their standpoint is that any purchase with the express purpose of commercial resale is technically "wholesale" and not covered by the contract. This is potentially very important when it comes to transfer of rights and responsibilities (a complicated part of consumer protection legislation that is further confounded by state-level commerce laws).
Then they're fine. Google's sales condition was that buyers “may only purchase Devices for [their] personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”. Note that word "commercially". Under consumer law, you can sell your own stuff (doctrine of first sale) so they can't stop you selling privately. Google's clearly taking the position that if you're buying expressly to sell to another retailer, that's buying wholesale -- business-to-business -- and not covered by doctrine of first sale.
This is actually a very interesting point of law, and would make a fascinating test case. I think I'm on Google's side here -- one of the reasons consumer protection is so important is because customers rarely get to negotiate the terms. As the buyers couldn't negotiate the terms, the purchase of contract here was consumer and Google's Ts&Cs are effectively saying "this is not a wholesale contract. if you treat it like one it's void." which seems pretty valid to me.
Without knowing the name of the reseller, it's hard to see whether or not a specific law is being broken. Setting aside the "spirit of the law" that the GP referred to, there's a potential issue of misrepresentation. Was the reseller listing them as "new" or as "second hand -- as new"*? The initial purchase conferred consumer protections on the buyer only, and the law on the transferability of consumer rights is not straightforward. The reseller has no commercial contract with Google in respect of these phones, so who's responsible if one breaks? What if they do a Samsung and start catching fire -- are the new owners entitled to a replacement?
There's more to the market than loopholes and fiddling with prices, and most people simply aren't aware of how treacherous this area of law can be.
(* Actually, I don't understand how "as new" can be legal as a description -- much of the benefit of buying new is the warrantee period and related support.)
But, then again, to be fair... People said the exact same thing about the Industrial Revolution. Machines are going to take over! No jobs for anyone! But what really happened was jobs for everyone and things were great.
Based on history and evidence there isn't much to fear, but I just feel that things aren't quite the same this time around...
Of course they're not the same. The industrial revolution gave us carpet factories and fully carpeted homes. It made production cheap enough that we stopped gluing broken plates together. Over the last century, production has ramped up to the point that we have to be actively coerced to consume past satiation point -- your sports team's strip is updated every season so you'll replace something with several years of useful life left in its fabric.
We've displaced workers from job to job, rendering them more productive, but we've passed over the optimum of productivity vs population. There's nothing that we need all these people for.
It depends. There is still the element of creativity. Until the AI is so advanced that it can say "You know now that I have T if just did U and filled in V blank I could do Z!" That does not have to be some grand thing either it can be the small stuff and still be valuable.
The problem is that there is a relatively limited need for creativity, and indeed excessive creativity is discouraged in the market. Computer interfaces, for example, are for the most part rehashes of existing ideas, because creating something new would cause problems for the consumers. There's already enough material in Spotify and the like that you could spend your entire life without ever listening to the same song twice, but most of us don't want to do that. And you could even do the same with TV and cinema through Netflix or Amazon (even if they don't have a full lifetime's worth yet, at the rate they're growing they wouldn't run out during my lifetime).
Meanwhile, where genuinely creativity would be of benefit to mankind, it's generally too expensive for any commercial interest -- e.g. finishing the development of the thorium salt reactor
Why does a car need the curl utility to make bluetooth work?
It doesn't. The cURL installation will be there for updating software and/or satnav map data. The problem is that the guy's email address is easier to find than any contact details for the manufacturer's official support team.
I have a toyota corola and there is a delay between me posting and the post being published. This means I never get first post. Also how do I install "derp" leng?
I think this is a result of so many companies making it nearly impossible to get in contact with them, or only providing a forum on their website and saying to customers "you guys figure it out on your own." Okay, I get it that there's support costs.
One of the problems with offering support is that your average punter isn't capable of judging where the problem is and ensuring they're contacting the correct customer support. The classic one is the poor old ISP who gets everything right down to "my computer won't switch on". If you get vastly more irrelevant support calls than relevant support calls, the support desk is just going to become a massive cost sink.
Then game theory and chain reactions set in, because if the vendor of product X shuts down or hides their support services from normal users, the users with a genuine problem with product X will find a support number for product Y. The increase on load for product Y's support team leads them to hide their phone number, so now all issues with products X and Y start getting diverted to the team for product Z. Even if you haven't experienced this, you know it's a risk, so it's a race to hide your contact details before everyone else does.
The other confounding issue is corporate contracts. When I was in corporate IT apps management, we were the first point of contact -- users were not supposed to go directly to the vendor. So corporate software hides its support details -- it has to. Now it just so happens that a lot of corporate software is also used by private individuals too, and the hidden contact details for them could be an unintended side-effect.
Interestingly enough, I have to give credit to the Visual Studio team at Microsoft for actually doing it right. They have a feedback tool built right into Visual Studio which can give both positive or negative feedback, report bugs, and even take a screenshot right from within the program. Too bad the Windows team doesn't seem to follow their example in listening to feedback.
The difference is that most users of Visual Studio (regardless of what you think about it) are reasonably clued up, what with them being software developers and all. You're not going to get the usual stream of irrelevant and incoherent issues that you would get from non-technical users.
The answer is the "device drawer" that sensible car-makers added to the dash. The cable only sticks out a couple of cm, you plug in, drop the device in the drawer and shut it. Control it via the inline control protocol and job's a good-un.
I had a Peugeot 207 "m:play" which was advertised as multimedia ready - that solely consisted of having a 3.5mm jack in the glove box. Thats it.
Still the most effective solution. Road rage is bad enough when it's caused by human drivers -- adding Bluetooth drivers to the list of frustrations is going to get someone killed.
With wired technology, even a $1/£1/€1 device works perfectly fine. The complexity of Bluetooth and the general physics of wireless conspire to make bad devices bad. A 3.5mm plug may be less "advanced", but it's superior technology, just as the wheel is a superior technology to the hovercraft's "air-skirt" for most land-based purposes.
I don't even understand why the government buys software. With sovereign immunity copyright law doesn't apply to them. Just pirate it and be done with it.
I don't think the concept of "sovereign immunity" is part of the Berne Convention....
Apparently the vendor disabled copyright management at the Navy's request. I'm guessing the Navy has a specific resilience requirement that no software can rely on network availability, cos war can, y'know, break things.
What I was considering saying was that if anything, that makes ex-military less suitable to make decisions than non-military. I decided against it because it sounded a lot like the same "us and them" that I was arguing against. But the thing is that this is a logical standpoint only, and it is certainly not my personal view that former service personnel should be disenfranchised. I am very much against disenfranchisement of anyone. Does that extend to deposed military dictators? My gut reaction to the suggestion that Hitler (had he not shot himself) should have been allowed to vote in democratic elections is one of utter horror, but on the other hand, Hitler was one man, who gets one vote, so yes, it would be right and fair that he gets the vote.
Disenfranchisement of felons in the US in principle seems acceptable, even though I am personally against it in principle. But then when you analyse it, it's unworkable. When you look at who ends up disenfranchised, there's a clear bias against non-WASPs. African-Americans and Latinos are more heavily affected than white people, and not just because they commit proportionally more crimes (that's a flawed statistic that ignores the correlation of social class with crime and the lack of social mobility for non-whites) -- it's because they get heavier sentences than whites for similar crimes, and in certain cases (e.g. drug possession) this can mean the difference between a sentence leading to disenfranchisement and one without.
Any other means of restricting the franchise is going to exhibit a similar unintended bias. Exclude military and you exclude groups that are overrepresented in the military; limit to ex-military and you exclude many other groups. Universal franchise is cleanest.
Stuff like adherence to Geneva Convention: nuclear bombing a city (with "small" 2kt nuclear weapons), purposefully attacking civilian infrastructure to intimidate the population, that sort of thing. And right at the beginning of the book.
So just like WWII then.
Yes. But we are supposed to be OK with that. And I am not OK with that.
"Black" is not a race either, but making offensive statements about black people is pretty much racism. Islamophobia technically might not be racist, but in practice, those anti-Muslim policies are aimed at Muslims from predominantly Arabic countries. And how is "it's technically not racism, it's just religious intolerance" better, anyways?
That's far more insightful than the zero score reflects.
The whole concept of racism proliferates racism by reinforcing the flawed belief in "race". There is no such thing as race. For much of last century, it was believed that the humans of the different continents evolved from different ancestral species of homonid -- by talking about races, they were really talking about specieses... and people really, really believed that.
Every time someone says "that's not racist", they're reinforcing some bullshit arbitrary distinction between nonsensical "races". And the worst part of it is, our concept of race is so skewed that you're only white if all you ancestors were, but one bit of black and you're black; for example, Barack Obama is categorised as "America's first black president" rather than "America's latest white president" and people are howling about having a "black" MJ in the latest Spiderman film. Barack Obama and Zendaya both have white mothers, so why do we define their "race" by 50% of their genes?
Prejudice is not bad, it's a core mechanism of the human brain. It is only a problem when we cease to use our higher functions to challenge it. But that's really off-topic, so to bring it back to the topic, that's the problem with Heinlein's original book. It's a long time since I read it, but I don't remember there being anything at all that challenged the idea that the Arachnids were anything but enemies, and the nicknaming of them as "bugs" was never questioned. It was a simple "they started it, let's kill em" plot.
The real danger in the book is that at that time all wars were actually fought between humans (primitive, pre-interstellar wars are hard to picture, I know) and "nasty aliens attack and we are obliged to kill them all" hides the true moral issues that underlie genuine human conflict. This thread occurs in all countries' fiction at some point, but it just keeps bubbling back to the surface in America at the moment. Independence Day and Battle: Los Angeles were the same. Faceless, voiceless, nameless enemies that appear, attack and must therefore be killed. Do not question, merely shoot. In Independence Day, the people who believed in peaceful coexistence were the first to be killed. That's more than a little symbolic. Scary scary psychology.
Your larger point is true, but i think the GP was talking about Wahhabi and Sufi extremists sects, which are very much based in the middle east. These are the main generators of the violent extremist muslim ideology.
...which is why it is so wrong to associate the violence with Islam. Associating the whole religion with the actions of a violent few is like blaming Burlington, Vermont for Ted Bundy's actions.
> Starship Troopers has been decried as promoting fascism and being racist
unbelievable. The entire movie is biting satire of the perils of a society always at war and a society with a universally hated enemy.
The book. They're talking about the book Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. To be honest, I don't see how you can really make a film out of a book which was mostly about the thoughts of a guy jumping around in a suit of power-enhanced armour (Warhammer 40K's Space Marines are heavily derived from the Mobile Infantry of the book) firing miniature nuclear warheads at aliens from a distance, but there you go.
If you never served your country in any capacity - neither military nor civil service - I don't trust you with voting and nobody should.
In the American Civil War, it was discovered that human beings really don't like pointing guns at other human beings -- the vast majority of shots fired during the war were deliberately fired into the air or the ground. So in order to create an effective fighting force, militaries the world over now subject recruits to humiliating, dehumanising treatment and instil in them a deep hatred of "the other". It works well in combat, but it has knock-on effects. For one thing, civilians in an overseas warzone are the same "them" as the other army, so become the "enemy" by default. This alone explains about 95% of atrocities committed against civilians during wars in the last century.
How is this relevant here? Because it has effects when the soldiers return home. The mindset in the parent post is one of us vs them, and if you're not one of "us", you're one of "them". It's a very dangerous position to take, because it allows the arbitrary dehumanisation of anyone you like, and the recasting of people with different opinions as "enemies".
It doesn't have to be that way. Instead we can respect everyone's right to an opinion, and assume their opinions are formed in good faith. If we disagree with their opinions or their reasoning, then we can discuss and explain. Telling them their opinion doesn't count isn't productive.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy into this non-sense. I'm not buying into Google's terms and conditions. If they sold a product the consumer has the right of resale regardless of what was in the terms of service. You can put whatever you like in a TOS and that doesn't make it legal.
"The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner."
Actually, you seem to be right, but the appropriate citation would be Bobbs-Merrill Co. Vs Straus, which established the doctrine of first sale in the context of wholesale agreements. Indeed, no law was broken.
You could level similar accusations at me, to be fair...
I agree.
If nothing illegal was done here...what's the problem?
As I've just commented above, maybe the law was broken. There is a huge difference in law between a retail contract and a business-to-business contract and the related rights. Google's Ts&Cs say no "commercial resale", specifically because they know that they can't ban private resale. But their standpoint is that any purchase with the express purpose of commercial resale is technically "wholesale" and not covered by the contract. This is potentially very important when it comes to transfer of rights and responsibilities (a complicated part of consumer protection legislation that is further confounded by state-level commerce laws).
Then they're fine. Google's sales condition was that buyers “may only purchase Devices for [their] personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”. Note that word "commercially". Under consumer law, you can sell your own stuff (doctrine of first sale) so they can't stop you selling privately. Google's clearly taking the position that if you're buying expressly to sell to another retailer, that's buying wholesale -- business-to-business -- and not covered by doctrine of first sale.
This is actually a very interesting point of law, and would make a fascinating test case. I think I'm on Google's side here -- one of the reasons consumer protection is so important is because customers rarely get to negotiate the terms. As the buyers couldn't negotiate the terms, the purchase of contract here was consumer and Google's Ts&Cs are effectively saying "this is not a wholesale contract. if you treat it like one it's void." which seems pretty valid to me.
Without knowing the name of the reseller, it's hard to see whether or not a specific law is being broken. Setting aside the "spirit of the law" that the GP referred to, there's a potential issue of misrepresentation. Was the reseller listing them as "new" or as "second hand -- as new"*? The initial purchase conferred consumer protections on the buyer only, and the law on the transferability of consumer rights is not straightforward. The reseller has no commercial contract with Google in respect of these phones, so who's responsible if one breaks? What if they do a Samsung and start catching fire -- are the new owners entitled to a replacement?
There's more to the market than loopholes and fiddling with prices, and most people simply aren't aware of how treacherous this area of law can be.
(* Actually, I don't understand how "as new" can be legal as a description -- much of the benefit of buying new is the warrantee period and related support.)
But, then again, to be fair... People said the exact same thing about the Industrial Revolution. Machines are going to take over! No jobs for anyone! But what really happened was jobs for everyone and things were great.
Based on history and evidence there isn't much to fear, but I just feel that things aren't quite the same this time around...
Of course they're not the same. The industrial revolution gave us carpet factories and fully carpeted homes. It made production cheap enough that we stopped gluing broken plates together. Over the last century, production has ramped up to the point that we have to be actively coerced to consume past satiation point -- your sports team's strip is updated every season so you'll replace something with several years of useful life left in its fabric.
We've displaced workers from job to job, rendering them more productive, but we've passed over the optimum of productivity vs population. There's nothing that we need all these people for.
I do believe the GP was being sarcastic.
It depends. There is still the element of creativity. Until the AI is so advanced that it can say "You know now that I have T if just did U and filled in V blank I could do Z!" That does not have to be some grand thing either it can be the small stuff and still be valuable.
The problem is that there is a relatively limited need for creativity, and indeed excessive creativity is discouraged in the market. Computer interfaces, for example, are for the most part rehashes of existing ideas, because creating something new would cause problems for the consumers. There's already enough material in Spotify and the like that you could spend your entire life without ever listening to the same song twice, but most of us don't want to do that. And you could even do the same with TV and cinema through Netflix or Amazon (even if they don't have a full lifetime's worth yet, at the rate they're growing they wouldn't run out during my lifetime).
Meanwhile, where genuinely creativity would be of benefit to mankind, it's generally too expensive for any commercial interest -- e.g. finishing the development of the thorium salt reactor
Why does a car need the curl utility to make bluetooth work?
It doesn't. The cURL installation will be there for updating software and/or satnav map data. The problem is that the guy's email address is easier to find than any contact details for the manufacturer's official support team.
First!
I have a toyota corola and there is a delay between me posting and the post being published. This means I never get first post. Also how do I install "derp" leng?
I think this is a result of so many companies making it nearly impossible to get in contact with them, or only providing a forum on their website and saying to customers "you guys figure it out on your own." Okay, I get it that there's support costs.
One of the problems with offering support is that your average punter isn't capable of judging where the problem is and ensuring they're contacting the correct customer support. The classic one is the poor old ISP who gets everything right down to "my computer won't switch on". If you get vastly more irrelevant support calls than relevant support calls, the support desk is just going to become a massive cost sink.
Then game theory and chain reactions set in, because if the vendor of product X shuts down or hides their support services from normal users, the users with a genuine problem with product X will find a support number for product Y. The increase on load for product Y's support team leads them to hide their phone number, so now all issues with products X and Y start getting diverted to the team for product Z. Even if you haven't experienced this, you know it's a risk, so it's a race to hide your contact details before everyone else does.
The other confounding issue is corporate contracts. When I was in corporate IT apps management, we were the first point of contact -- users were not supposed to go directly to the vendor. So corporate software hides its support details -- it has to. Now it just so happens that a lot of corporate software is also used by private individuals too, and the hidden contact details for them could be an unintended side-effect.
Interestingly enough, I have to give credit to the Visual Studio team at Microsoft for actually doing it right. They have a feedback tool built right into Visual Studio which can give both positive or negative feedback, report bugs, and even take a screenshot right from within the program. Too bad the Windows team doesn't seem to follow their example in listening to feedback.
The difference is that most users of Visual Studio (regardless of what you think about it) are reasonably clued up, what with them being software developers and all. You're not going to get the usual stream of irrelevant and incoherent issues that you would get from non-technical users.
The answer is the "device drawer" that sensible car-makers added to the dash. The cable only sticks out a couple of cm, you plug in, drop the device in the drawer and shut it. Control it via the inline control protocol and job's a good-un.
I had a Peugeot 207 "m:play" which was advertised as multimedia ready - that solely consisted of having a 3.5mm jack in the glove box. Thats it.
Still the most effective solution. Road rage is bad enough when it's caused by human drivers -- adding Bluetooth drivers to the list of frustrations is going to get someone killed.
With wired technology, even a $1/£1/€1 device works perfectly fine. The complexity of Bluetooth and the general physics of wireless conspire to make bad devices bad. A 3.5mm plug may be less "advanced", but it's superior technology, just as the wheel is a superior technology to the hovercraft's "air-skirt" for most land-based purposes.
I don't even understand why the government buys software. With sovereign immunity copyright law doesn't apply to them. Just pirate it and be done with it.
I don't think the concept of "sovereign immunity" is part of the Berne Convention....
Apparently the vendor disabled copyright management at the Navy's request. I'm guessing the Navy has a specific resilience requirement that no software can rely on network availability, cos war can, y'know, break things.
Disenfranchisement of felons in the US in principle seems acceptable, even though I am personally against it in principle. But then when you analyse it, it's unworkable. When you look at who ends up disenfranchised, there's a clear bias against non-WASPs. African-Americans and Latinos are more heavily affected than white people, and not just because they commit proportionally more crimes (that's a flawed statistic that ignores the correlation of social class with crime and the lack of social mobility for non-whites) -- it's because they get heavier sentences than whites for similar crimes, and in certain cases (e.g. drug possession) this can mean the difference between a sentence leading to disenfranchisement and one without.
Any other means of restricting the franchise is going to exhibit a similar unintended bias. Exclude military and you exclude groups that are overrepresented in the military; limit to ex-military and you exclude many other groups. Universal franchise is cleanest.
So just like WWII then.
Yes. But we are supposed to be OK with that. And I am not OK with that.
"Black" is not a race either, but making offensive statements about black people is pretty much racism. Islamophobia technically might not be racist, but in practice, those anti-Muslim policies are aimed at Muslims from predominantly Arabic countries. And how is "it's technically not racism, it's just religious intolerance" better, anyways?
That's far more insightful than the zero score reflects.
The whole concept of racism proliferates racism by reinforcing the flawed belief in "race". There is no such thing as race. For much of last century, it was believed that the humans of the different continents evolved from different ancestral species of homonid -- by talking about races, they were really talking about specieses... and people really, really believed that.
Every time someone says "that's not racist", they're reinforcing some bullshit arbitrary distinction between nonsensical "races". And the worst part of it is, our concept of race is so skewed that you're only white if all you ancestors were, but one bit of black and you're black; for example, Barack Obama is categorised as "America's first black president" rather than "America's latest white president" and people are howling about having a "black" MJ in the latest Spiderman film. Barack Obama and Zendaya both have white mothers, so why do we define their "race" by 50% of their genes?
Racism is racist.
The real danger in the book is that at that time all wars were actually fought between humans (primitive, pre-interstellar wars are hard to picture, I know) and "nasty aliens attack and we are obliged to kill them all" hides the true moral issues that underlie genuine human conflict. This thread occurs in all countries' fiction at some point, but it just keeps bubbling back to the surface in America at the moment. Independence Day and Battle: Los Angeles were the same. Faceless, voiceless, nameless enemies that appear, attack and must therefore be killed. Do not question, merely shoot. In Independence Day, the people who believed in peaceful coexistence were the first to be killed. That's more than a little symbolic. Scary scary psychology.
Your larger point is true, but i think the GP was talking about Wahhabi and Sufi extremists sects, which are very much based in the middle east. These are the main generators of the violent extremist muslim ideology.
...which is why it is so wrong to associate the violence with Islam. Associating the whole religion with the actions of a violent few is like blaming Burlington, Vermont for Ted Bundy's actions.
> Starship Troopers has been decried as promoting fascism and being racist
unbelievable. The entire movie is biting satire of the perils of a society always at war and a society with a universally hated enemy.
The book. They're talking about the book Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. To be honest, I don't see how you can really make a film out of a book which was mostly about the thoughts of a guy jumping around in a suit of power-enhanced armour (Warhammer 40K's Space Marines are heavily derived from the Mobile Infantry of the book) firing miniature nuclear warheads at aliens from a distance, but there you go.
If you never served your country in any capacity - neither military nor civil service - I don't trust you with voting and nobody should.
In the American Civil War, it was discovered that human beings really don't like pointing guns at other human beings -- the vast majority of shots fired during the war were deliberately fired into the air or the ground. So in order to create an effective fighting force, militaries the world over now subject recruits to humiliating, dehumanising treatment and instil in them a deep hatred of "the other". It works well in combat, but it has knock-on effects. For one thing, civilians in an overseas warzone are the same "them" as the other army, so become the "enemy" by default. This alone explains about 95% of atrocities committed against civilians during wars in the last century.
How is this relevant here? Because it has effects when the soldiers return home. The mindset in the parent post is one of us vs them, and if you're not one of "us", you're one of "them". It's a very dangerous position to take, because it allows the arbitrary dehumanisation of anyone you like, and the recasting of people with different opinions as "enemies".
It doesn't have to be that way. Instead we can respect everyone's right to an opinion, and assume their opinions are formed in good faith. If we disagree with their opinions or their reasoning, then we can discuss and explain. Telling them their opinion doesn't count isn't productive.
Companies don't invent new things anymore? That's news to me. And to the patent office.
As I said, companies invent variations on a proven theme, and patent them.
I too believe people who do wrong should receive no mercy. Execute all jaywalkers!
Execution's too quick.
Send the jaywalkers to Gitmo!