>The manufacture won't take it back for a return, >and the store can't resell a non-shrink-wrapped >POS
I'd look into whether that qualifies for an insurance claim against inventory shrinkage. It certainly does not justify violating the consumer rights of your customers. I believe this is decidedly the merchant's problem, and that it is unethical, if not illegal, for them to pass the responsibility for the problem to the consumer.
"It's both, stores hate taking back opened software since their distributor usually hate it even more."
What the stores and the warehouses and the publishers love or hate is irrelevant to me as a consumer, and I will not accept this as evidence that they should be immune from prosecution under US Code.
If I don't love paying taxes, does that make me exempt? Didn't think so. So explain to me why the fact that stores hate operating according to the law that protects my rights as a consumer, constitutes a defense for them not doing so?
>And how is a consumer to read a EULA on a >website if they do not have internet access? If >they live in a remote area and can not find >public internet access?
For the purpose of prevailing in a civil suit, it may be sufficient that they have a website, and perhaps, they might offer to fax or mail the information on request. Whatever it takes to satisfy "good faith" would be sufficient. I am willing to bet ($1.00) that everyone named in this suit already has a way for an interested consumer to avail himself of the license terms before purchasing the products, and that the suit will be a nonstarter.
>How about a new concept: when you buy something, >you own it.
That's an old concept, and as a policy it has defects when the "something" that you buy is a service or an idea.
If you're hoping for enforcement, it helps a great deal if there is a witness to the oral agreement, and it also helps if both parties have something at stake in the transaction.
>Are there seriously still people who don't have >MS Office?
There are projects for which the price of MS Windows and MS Office will preclude the project being done. Such things may not matter to you, since you obviously either have working capital or are willing to compromise your ethics. What if your entire expected revenue was less than the price of that software, but the system you want to develop has value other than cash value? Because of the price of Office, you're suggesting that such a project should not even be done.
That's not your call. It's okay that there are alternatives, and that people choose to use them!
>when the bill of rights was drafted they used >muzzle-loading, single ball shot...
The weapon technology is not the issue. Remember that the American Revolution was fought between two factions of the same army, with the highest military technology and the most developed strategy and tactics of today.
The equivalent revolution today would involve modern weaponry, modern tactics, and modern regimentation.
The people who framed the Constitution had experienced a military victory against the lawful authority which had formerly commanded them, which had supplied them, and which had recruited and trained their soldiers.
An issue large enough to justify a true revolution will be so compelling and so universally recognized that it will persuade military units to take aggression against their authority. No matter where you stand at that point, you must reserve the right to either help or hinder such activity. You might be able to make a difference with a hunting rifle or a composite bow, you might not. But you must reserve the right to try. That's part of why the 2nd amendment is so important.
>I'll grab an axe and head off to the deepest >darkest woods I can find.
You might want to look into the ways the Department of Agriculture has made that into a crime... Even if you don't use the axe... your public lands are not yours anymore.
>And we all know it's nonsense, but we don't seem >to care.
We care, and we'll show it quick if we start seeing the soldiers coming back in wheelchairs, with artificial limbs, etc. But we probably won't see that, since Iraq has no army to fight ours with, which to me obviates the entire premise for fighting them.
I'm pretty sure the OP means "strong Go-playing computer" versus "strong Go-playing human" matches would be interesting. For chess, Kasparov against Sargon I would not be interesting. We need the Go-playing computer equivalent of Deep Foo. Unfortunately, to create an automaton to play Go at a master level is either a problem that can never be solved, or else, is not interesting enough that anyone is really working on it.
One factor that I think is important is the fact that the guy on the street might be familiar with the name "Kasparov", at least more commonly than the equivalent Go-master (which is who, exactly?) Also, it comes as no surprise to me that the people who put the effort and finances into these big chess playing computers would choose chess, which is a characteristically "Western" game... Why hasn't China's equivalent of IBM created the equivalent for Weiqi?
We keep hearing stories about photos that may or may not help make sense of the accident, but, the pictures are not shown to us. In the hours after the accident, we saw all kinds of fuzzy images, such as the still of the insulation hitting the wing, and all sorts of video of the re-entry. So why all of a sudden don't we get to see the film? What's with the guy in California who apparently gave his camera, negatives, prints (I guess it was film?) to some spooks? Why are we supposed to accept a story claiming what "high resolution tracking cameras" captured, when we aren't allowed to see these images for ourselves?
>The telemetry link monitors a lot more >paramaters than the typical FDR.
Sure, the typical recorder doesn't even record a 737's data to the extent that I expect it should, given the state of the art in avionics technology.
But we're not talking about that -- we're talking about the data recorder that would be put on the space shuttle! Hardened against re-entry, temperature extremes, radiation, acceleration, and 5x redundant. It's not really a necessary approach though, and the resources for such a thing are better used for telemetry systems.
If every commercial airliner was continuously monitored through its flight by every means possible, triangulated radar, military escorts, satellites, voice and data commos on multiple frequency bands, and had thousands of people on the ground anticipating and watching, we wouldn't need blackboxes on 7x7's either.
>Accidents are going to happen, expect it, and >move on.
That approach works for the layman. It does not work for the engineers and the physicists who need to do the moving on -- they still need to design and fly spaceships. Don't expect the space program to simply "move on" and accept that one launch out of 50 is going to be a catastrophe.
If we must accept that, it's the end of the program.
>What they aren't doing is examining the content >of your phone call
Well, what they examine or don't examine isn't really the issue. Whether the information obtained can ever be brought into a trial is really the concern. If such data is not gathered under very specific conditions for very specific purposes, it will not be useful as evidence, and could even work against them.
>[E]ven though there's no legal basis for them to >be able to do so.
That's not a wise strategy if people start standing up to them and these cases start getting heard by courts. They're dipping their toes into the waters where racketeering charges swim...
"While it is customary for warrants to be directed to an officer of the law, they can be granted to private individuals, no?"
Yes and no. A good example is the Nortwest Airlines sickout case. The company applied for and was granted a search warrant, in 1999. But the actual searches were carried out by agents of the law, with the company's representatives acting as witnesses. A police agency may call upon experts in a field for assistance in a search, especially if the evidence being sought is of a technical nature, but the government still maintains an absolute monopoly on the use of force.
I'd like to see the case history on these BSA incidents, but the anecdotes suggest that no such case has been tried. Also, such warrants are generally sealed, because the information in the warrant itself could be incriminating.
Doom2 STILL WORKS. You still have it. You can still play it if you want to. You upgraded to the "new and improved" games, exactly why?
Did agents from Id Software come to your door and demand that you surrender your Doom2 cd?
I have a colleague who is an attorney. He uses Wordperfect in his office, on a Novell netowrk. It is tempting to suggest all sorts of upgrades, and I would be in a position to suggest *only* the upgrades that would truly be beneficial. Nevertheless, when I really look at the situation, the fact is that his system is right now at this moment, absolutely ideal for the work that is done in that office. So much so, that if I were to replace this system I might do it with a linux box emulating novell for a file server, and quite possibly, linux workstations running WordPerfect under dosemu. Because I know the new machines are going to have problems with DOS.
What I WOULD NOT do, is I definitely would not replace the system with XP, with Word, with a later version of Wordperfect, or with OpenOffice. Unfortunately, that's what is going on in too many offices, for no better reason than "because we can."
I'm certain there will be conflicting values in the Commercial Code.. One man's nonrenewable software license is another man's unlawful restraint of trade.
>"Prove I didn't". The burden of proof is on >them.
You haven't been party to a civil suit.
You cannot simply go into court with your hands in your pockets as the defense, while the plaintiff has a well-reasoned argument and a stack of evidence against you.
However, you CAN demand that every hearing be heard by a jury. Resolutely insisting on having a jury trial for everything has saved my ass a few times.
>They came back in an hour with US Marshalls and >a warrant.
SO the Marshalls can come in and do whatever the Judge said they can do. The BSA folks still have to wait in the car. At the moment they turned the case over to the State, they are no longer involved, and you don't have to let them in your building or speak to them ever again until you're in a court room.
These people do you a favor when they pull the pin on the legal hand grenade, because from that moment, your rights and responsibilities are very clear. Nothing else happens without a hearing.
I'm confused about the burdens of proof here as well, and I suspect that all the cases have been settled by the defense rather than going to trial.
The main thing that confuses me is that I keep reading stories about the Marshalls coming with search warrants while some administrative person runs an investigation. This does not make sense to me, because it is either a criminal matter where the BSA person should not be involved at all (only the police and the attorney general or district attorney will be involved in a warrant search), or it is a civil matter where the search and seizure happens after a hearing, and after the plaintiff has received an order granting specific permission for seizure of assets.
If anyone entered a place of business where I had responsibility, they would be asked to leave at once. The State Police would be called if they did not leave at once. If the person thinks he has some contract with me granting him the right to snoop in my office, he can discuss that with my lawyer or with a judge at a hearing where we will discuss this contract.
Simply having an agreement in your hand does not magically give you the right to trespass or seize property.
Now, if the police are investigating a criminal matter, that is worlds apart from what we've descibed so far. But the standards of evidence collection, the consequences of flawed procedure, and the burdens of proof are also very different in a criminal case. If the complainant does not also happen to be the peace officer who was granted the warrant, laws are being broken if he is the one performing the search. That's enough error to get the case thrown out and the plaintiff arrested or fined.
A trade organization's demands do not trump an individual's constitutional and civil rights. You DO have to submit to signed orders by a court. You DO NOT have to submit to enforcement tactics which circumvent due process of law. Ever.
Every time you give in to thugs, you diminish MY rights.
If someone is routinely monitoring your IP packets like that, how is it different from routinely monitoring your phone calls? Why doesn't this have to be done by a law enforcement agency, with a warrant in hand? Why isn't this covered under the same legal umbrella that affirms our right to have extension telephones? (You might not remember Bell charging monthly for each phone, available only under lease, but I do.)
We should be allowed to have NAT for the same reason we are allowed to have phones, and if the provider has a problem with that, they need to take a hike. Sniffing for this is unquestionably in bad taste, and it is also a violation of my civil rights.
I just finished going through my floppies from 1992. I had maybe 500 of them to go through. The number that failed just from being stored in a box was amazing. Luckily for me, the info wasn't really important, most of it was a daily backup of relay mail from my fidonet bbs. Unfortunately, a lot of good original software disks failed, including my Windows3.0, DesqView and DesqView/X originals, the Borland stuff, disks where I had stored school work, and so on. This experience made me realize that I will only ever use floppies for one purpose, and that is for a boot disk, to be used once. If they won't even last 10 years under temperature-controlled storage, what good are they?
"Everything I've seen for making bootable cd's requires you to have a bootable floppy around with drivers for the cd rom drive on the floppy."
I make bootable cdr's all the time on a machine that has no floppy drive at all. Use the loopback option for mounting, make your filesystem on a file instead of a device, and give mkisofs the -b option.
Taking this approach means you're not limited to the capacity of your floppy.
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>The manufacture won't take it back for a return,
>and the store can't resell a non-shrink-wrapped
>POS
I'd look into whether that qualifies for an insurance claim against inventory shrinkage.
It certainly does not justify violating the consumer rights of your customers. I believe this is decidedly the merchant's problem, and that it is unethical, if not illegal, for them to pass the responsibility for the problem to the consumer.
"It's both, stores hate taking back opened software since their distributor usually hate it even more."
What the stores and the warehouses and the publishers love or hate is irrelevant to me as a consumer, and I will not accept this as evidence that they should be immune from prosecution under US Code.
If I don't love paying taxes, does that make me exempt? Didn't think so. So explain to me why the fact that stores hate operating according to the law that protects my rights as a consumer, constitutes a defense for them not doing so?
>And how is a consumer to read a EULA on a
>website if they do not have internet access? If
>they live in a remote area and can not find
>public internet access?
For the purpose of prevailing in a civil suit, it may be sufficient that they have a website, and perhaps, they might offer to fax or mail the information on request. Whatever it takes to satisfy "good faith" would be sufficient. I am willing to bet ($1.00) that everyone named in this suit already has a way for an interested consumer to avail himself of the license terms before purchasing the products, and that the suit will be a nonstarter.
>How about a new concept: when you buy something,
>you own it.
That's an old concept, and as a policy it has defects when the "something" that you buy is a service or an idea.
If you're hoping for enforcement, it helps a great deal if there is a witness to the oral agreement, and it also helps if both parties have something at stake in the transaction.
>Are there seriously still people who don't have
>MS Office?
There are projects for which the price of MS Windows and MS Office will preclude the project being done. Such things may not matter to you, since you obviously either have working capital or are willing to compromise your ethics. What if your entire expected revenue was less than the price of that software, but the system you want to develop has value other than cash value? Because of the price of Office, you're suggesting that such a project should not even be done.
That's not your call. It's okay that there are alternatives, and that people choose to use them!
>when the bill of rights was drafted they used
>muzzle-loading, single ball shot...
The weapon technology is not the issue.
Remember that the American Revolution was fought
between two factions of the same army, with the highest military technology and the most developed strategy and tactics of today.
The equivalent revolution today would involve modern weaponry, modern tactics, and modern regimentation.
The people who framed the Constitution had experienced a military victory against the lawful authority which had formerly commanded them, which had supplied them, and which had recruited and trained their soldiers.
An issue large enough to justify a true revolution will be so compelling and so universally recognized that it will persuade military units to take aggression against their authority. No matter where you stand at that point, you must reserve the right to either help or hinder such activity. You might be able to make a difference with a hunting rifle or a composite bow, you might not. But you must reserve the right to try. That's part of why the 2nd amendment is so important.
>I'll grab an axe and head off to the deepest
>darkest woods I can find.
You might want to look into the ways the Department of Agriculture has made that into
a crime... Even if you don't use the axe... your
public lands are not yours anymore.
>And we all know it's nonsense, but we don't seem
>to care.
We care, and we'll show it quick if we start seeing the soldiers coming back in wheelchairs, with artificial limbs, etc. But we probably won't see that, since Iraq has no army to fight ours with, which to me obviates the entire premise for fighting them.
>That's odd, I've never met an American that
>didn't have health care. It's always included as
>part of a job for the people I know.
You don't know anyone without a job? Everybody you know *with* a job has a professional-type job that pays benefits?
I'm pretty sure the OP means "strong Go-playing computer" versus "strong Go-playing human" matches would be interesting. For chess, Kasparov against Sargon I would not be interesting. We need the Go-playing computer equivalent of Deep Foo. Unfortunately, to create an automaton to play Go at a master level is either a problem that can never be solved, or else, is not interesting enough that anyone is really working on it.
One factor that I think is important is the fact that the guy on the street might be familiar with the name "Kasparov", at least more commonly than the equivalent Go-master (which is who, exactly?)
Also, it comes as no surprise to me that the people who put the effort and finances into these big chess playing computers would choose chess, which is a characteristically "Western" game... Why hasn't China's equivalent of IBM created the equivalent for Weiqi?
We keep hearing stories about photos that may or may not help make sense of the accident, but, the
pictures are not shown to us. In the hours after the accident, we saw all kinds of fuzzy images, such as the still of the insulation hitting the wing, and all sorts of video of the re-entry. So why all of a sudden don't we get to see the film? What's with the guy in California who apparently gave his camera, negatives, prints (I guess it was film?) to some spooks? Why are we supposed to accept a story claiming what "high resolution tracking cameras" captured, when we aren't allowed to see these images for ourselves?
>The telemetry link monitors a lot more
>paramaters than the typical FDR.
Sure, the typical recorder doesn't even record a 737's data to the extent that I expect it should, given the state of the art in avionics technology.
But we're not talking about that -- we're talking about the data recorder that would be put on the space shuttle! Hardened against re-entry, temperature extremes, radiation, acceleration, and 5x redundant. It's not really a necessary approach though, and the resources for such a thing are better used for telemetry systems.
If every commercial airliner was continuously monitored through its flight by every means possible, triangulated radar, military escorts, satellites, voice and data commos on multiple frequency bands, and had thousands of people on the ground anticipating and watching, we wouldn't need blackboxes on 7x7's either.
>Accidents are going to happen, expect it, and
>move on.
That approach works for the layman. It does not work for the engineers and the physicists who need to do the moving on -- they still need to design and fly spaceships. Don't expect the space program to simply "move on" and accept that one launch out of 50 is going to be a catastrophe.
If we must accept that, it's the end of the program.
>What they aren't doing is examining the content
>of your phone call
Well, what they examine or don't examine isn't really the issue. Whether the information obtained can ever be brought into a trial is really the concern. If such data is not gathered under very specific conditions for very specific purposes, it will not be useful as evidence, and could even work against them.
>[E]ven though there's no legal basis for them to
>be able to do so.
That's not a wise strategy if people start standing up to them and these cases start getting heard by courts. They're dipping their toes into the waters where racketeering charges swim...
"While it is customary for warrants to be directed to an officer of the law, they can be granted to private individuals, no?"
Yes and no. A good example is the Nortwest Airlines sickout case. The company applied for and was granted a search warrant, in 1999.
But the actual searches were carried out by agents of the law, with the company's representatives acting as witnesses. A police agency may call upon experts in a field for assistance in a search, especially if the evidence being sought is of a technical nature, but the government still maintains an absolute monopoly on the use of force.
I'd like to see the case history on these BSA incidents, but the anecdotes suggest that no such case has been tried. Also, such warrants are generally sealed, because the information in the warrant itself could be incriminating.
>What happened to the days of doom 2
You missed the point of the discussion.
Doom2 STILL WORKS. You still have it. You can still play it if you want to. You upgraded to the "new and improved" games, exactly why?
Did agents from Id Software come to your door and demand that you surrender your Doom2 cd?
I have a colleague who is an attorney. He uses Wordperfect in his office, on a Novell netowrk. It is tempting to suggest all sorts of upgrades, and I would be in a position to suggest *only* the upgrades that would truly be beneficial. Nevertheless, when I really look at the situation, the fact is that his system is right now at this moment, absolutely ideal for the work that is done in that office. So much so, that if I were to replace this system I might do it with a linux box emulating novell for a file server, and quite possibly, linux workstations running WordPerfect under dosemu. Because I know the new machines are going to have problems with DOS.
What I WOULD NOT do, is I definitely would not replace the system with XP, with Word, with a later version of Wordperfect, or with OpenOffice. Unfortunately, that's what is going on in too many offices, for no better reason than "because we can."
>technically illegal to run the old one
I'm certain there will be conflicting values in the Commercial Code.. One man's nonrenewable software license is another man's unlawful restraint of trade.
>"Prove I didn't". The burden of proof is on
>them.
You haven't been party to a civil suit.
You cannot simply go into court with your hands in your pockets as the defense, while the plaintiff has a well-reasoned argument and a stack of evidence against you.
However, you CAN demand that every hearing be heard by a jury. Resolutely insisting on having a jury trial for everything has saved my ass a few times.
Why didn't you send them a cease and desist order, citing harassment, and claiming damages?
Sound's like a lot of people settle with these thugs, and lots more just toss the letters. The letter itself might constitute a civil offense.
>They came back in an hour with US Marshalls and
>a warrant.
SO the Marshalls can come in and do whatever the Judge said they can do. The BSA folks still have to wait in the car. At the moment they turned the case over to the State, they are no longer involved, and you don't have to let them in your building or speak to them ever again until you're in a court room.
These people do you a favor when they pull the pin on the legal hand grenade, because from that moment, your rights and responsibilities are very clear. Nothing else happens without a hearing.
I'm confused about the burdens of proof here as well, and I suspect that all the cases have been settled by the defense rather than going to trial.
The main thing that confuses me is that I keep reading stories about the Marshalls coming with search warrants while some administrative person runs an investigation. This does not make sense to me, because it is either a criminal matter where the BSA person should not be involved at all (only the police and the attorney general or district attorney will be involved in a warrant search), or it is a civil matter where the search and seizure happens after a hearing, and after the plaintiff has received an order granting specific permission for seizure of assets.
If anyone entered a place of business where I had responsibility, they would be asked to leave at once. The State Police would be called if they did not leave at once. If the person thinks he has some contract with me granting him the right to snoop in my office, he can discuss that with my lawyer or with a judge at a hearing where we will discuss this contract.
Simply having an agreement in your hand does not magically give you the right to trespass or seize property.
Now, if the police are investigating a criminal matter, that is worlds apart from what we've descibed so far. But the standards of evidence collection, the consequences of flawed procedure, and the burdens of proof are also very different in a criminal case. If the complainant does not also happen to be the peace officer who was granted the warrant, laws are being broken if he is the one performing the search. That's enough error to get the case thrown out and the plaintiff arrested or fined.
A trade organization's demands do not trump an individual's constitutional and civil rights. You DO have to submit to signed orders by a court. You DO NOT have to submit to enforcement tactics which circumvent due process of law. Ever.
Every time you give in to thugs, you diminish MY rights.
If someone is routinely monitoring your IP packets like that, how is it different from routinely monitoring your phone calls? Why doesn't this have to be done by a law enforcement agency, with a warrant in hand? Why isn't this covered under the same legal umbrella that affirms our right to have extension telephones? (You might not remember Bell charging monthly for each phone, available only under lease, but I do.)
We should be allowed to have NAT for the same reason we are allowed to have phones, and if the provider has a problem with that, they need to take a hike. Sniffing for this is unquestionably in bad taste, and it is also a violation of my civil rights.
I just finished going through my floppies from 1992. I had maybe 500 of them to go through. The number that failed just from being stored in a box was amazing. Luckily for me, the info wasn't really important, most of it was a daily backup of relay mail from my fidonet bbs. Unfortunately, a lot of good original software disks failed, including my Windows3.0, DesqView and DesqView/X originals, the Borland stuff, disks where I had stored school work, and so on.
This experience made me realize that I will only ever use floppies for one purpose, and that is for a boot disk, to be used once. If they won't even last 10 years under temperature-controlled storage, what good are they?
"Everything I've seen for making bootable cd's requires you to have a bootable floppy around with drivers for the cd rom drive on the floppy."
I make bootable cdr's all the time on a machine that has no floppy drive at all. Use the loopback option for mounting, make your filesystem on a file instead of a device, and give mkisofs the -b option.
Taking this approach means you're not limited to the capacity of your floppy.