"As a parent, there's no way in a hell a 7 year old will have a lock down to keep mom and dad out, no responsible parent will allow such a thing, and the machine gets taken away if such a practice is put into place."
I did not understand that point of view at 7, and I do not agree with it a 40-something.
It seems to go without saying that children are not entitled to privacy from their parents. I say it is up to the individual parent. Many parents DO respect their children enough to give them privacy. Some consider doing otherwise to be a form of abuse.
>I'd like to know how many people here have actually been taken to court, or taken someone else (a company) to >court or other legal proceedings over what was said in an EULA.
None. Court cases involving software EULA's with the *consumer* as a party are vanishingly rare. You may find conflicts between publishing and distribution companies, and the like, where cases were settled on the basis of terms in one of these licenses.
There have been a few suits filed by consumers against companies, most famously against Microsoft.
There are VERY few rulings that directly speak to validity of terms in a specific EULA, most famous one I know of being the judgment against Network Associates that they COULD NOT suppress product reviews via EULA.
There is also the Sony/BMG lawsuit where, even if the user said "NO" to the license, the software (DRM codec with a serious security flaw) was installed anyway.
I think there have been some EULA cases with phone licenses. Ask one of the slashdot lawyers or law students. They should be the ones studying this stuff.
My perspective is from the other direction: Find some basis to "invalidate" the GPL (I love the saying "...untested in court..." as though it is important)... Find that legal basis and ALL software contracts derived from copyright law are invalidated as well. Essentially if the author does not have the rights needed to license under the terms of the GPL, then he does not have some of the rights that copyright supposedly grants.
One argument will be "without these licenses, software makers will not produce the products." We all know how unlikely that is. Besides it would be fine and dandy if the playing field were more open. Another argument is that vendors will have to go back to individual agreements with each customer. I wonder what would be so wrong with that? If you want me to sign a contract in order to use your product, by all means, put the contract in front of me, let me evaluate its terms side-by-side with its consideration, and I'll get back to you -- maybe your competition offers better terms. Maybe your big ugly contract influenced me during the critical moment when I was hot to buy, and now I'm not so sure.
FYI, the only software I've ever written for profit, did indeed have an individually negotiated contract with each client, and the legal terms were specified in that, and would be fully enforceable in the state where I was doing business.
But these mass-market software folks want to have all the power of an individual contract (actually, they want more than the assignee can legally grant via contract, sometimes), but they want none of the obligations, and want to offer no real consideration. EULA's won't stand up as contracts, in general.
The GPL on the other hand, holds if the grantor actually has the appropriate rights under copyright law.
In essence, to "Test the GPL in Court" and find it invalid, would mean invalidating *copyright law* to a certain degree. In other words, this is not going to happen.
Would have been awfully nice to see the GPL considered side-by-side with these other licenses. Does the GPL also create an imbalance between the rights of the distributer and the rights of the consumer?
>Yes, he does seem to believe the hype that each copy means a lost sale.
Not a lost sale, exactly. Anyone who has taken a copy has made a purchase but the purchase price has not yet been collected. So it's not so much that "every copy" represents someone who "would have purchased", it represents a vast pool from which some people can be persuaded to pay - and this represents large potential gains.
>Gimp is already pretty good in displaying.psds, but doesn't support criticals features like layer sets.
I wonder how many PS users would put that as the first item on their list of "critical features" Layer sets are just a way of organizing layers into folders, correct?
I'm sure it's very handy to have. I'm also sure that every time I hear a Photoshop user raise an argument against Gimp, it usually references some obscure feature that just makes the Gimp user shrug and continue doing his graphics work with it.
The principal arguments in favor of Gimp are that it works really damn well for RGB editing, and that it costs $0.
I think what you are saying is that there are features that a Photoshop user can put into a Photoshop file that other programs do not support. I think the feature you mentioned isn't even supported by Elements or pre-CS2 versions of Photoshop.
I have never heard anyone suggest that Gimp should be used in a professional situation where the client expects you to use something else. Nobody said it would be an appropriate choice for you, in the scenario you describe (I hope).
>I don't really think so. I'm seeing a lot of people moving to the Mac
When I saw the Macbook Pro I immediately switched from my Linux notebook to Mac. There were a number of driving factors, but true portability was high on the list. My notebook is on the large-ish size yet I am easily able to carry it with me in my backpack - something I could not say for my previous notebook. Also, battery life, and a guarantee of hardware compatability between the OS and the wireless and video devices, and the fact that the underlying OS was still a flavor of unix, all sold me without hesitation.
My only annoyance so far after switching to Mac, has been the people who tell me I shouldn't have done that (giving reasons why THEY wouldn't have, or listing problems THEY have with OSX.) I just laugh... close my notebook knowing that it will go to sleep properly... and walk away...
>I can wholeheartedly tell you, NOTHING is idiot-proof.
Yeah yeah, but the OP you are flaming is right. Linux, particularly Ubuntu Linux, is a fine choice for deploying before the uneducated masses. Not only that, but the whole premise of the article is faulty. Linux doesn't spread? Linux spreads so swiftly and so thoroughly that there's not even a good idiom ("wildfire" stops at oceans and desert regions!)
Where do people get the idea that Linux isn't being adopted?
Your message is all about "VP's" and "managers" and what not. Vanishingly few people in the world are part of any corporate hierarchy. In your frame of reference, perhaps Linux is not very popular. But that isn't stopping it from spreading.
"There have been so many executive orders, bending of laws, etc. that just about every form of government access to information is authorized by something."
Sounds fine on Slashdot, alt.politics groups, or black helicopter chat, but in reality you can't even try to go in with that position as a prosecutor. Even a conservative judge will hand you your ass.
The implication is that a mere law can change the "safety" of the people in a country in any meaningful way, and the frightening thing is that some of the people accept this premise.
"I can't, however, imagine any way that I could play it that would make it what I would call a role-playing game."
No? You start out as a nearly bankrupt real estate speculator in an open market in Atlatic City... even the utilities and rail transport are up for grabs... competing against *other* nearly bankrupt shysters.
When you introduce the element of barter among players, and the auctioning off of real estate to the highest bidder, all kinds of role play dynamics take shape. I'm not saying it's Shadowrun or GURPS, just that I can sometimes put it in the category of "vintage RPG," if played that way, to a limited degree.
This might not help you, but with NVidia cards, the Linux driver that NVidia distributes, works really well even for 3D gaming.
If you can get the desktop to start with the XFree driver or whatever (might be ugly), install the "restricted drivers" and that should get you the NVidia driver from their site.
It's not Ubuntu's fault, NVidia does not allow this driver to be redistributed nor do they provide complete specs to independent developers.
>Settlers isn't significantly (if any) more complex than Monopoly, imho.
I rarely find people who both know the rules of Monopoly and are willing to play the game by those rules.
Whenever I play Monopoly I choose to play banker/auctioneer/referee, and choose not to have an avatar on the board at all (so as to be disinterested and impartial).
When you play the game by the rules and with a designated banker, the game mechanics take a back seat and a role playing element emerges. Also, when you play the game without some of the common house rules, the game moves rapidly forward and tends to reach a conclusion in a shorter time. Many people, and to my experience *most* people have learned the game with house rules that were aimed at redistributing tax money with the goal of staving off bankruptcy, and this has a side effect of making the game much more random, and also, tends to force the game to run much longer than the design intends.
With a full-time banker, another element comes out, and that is a barter/auction economy. But in order for this to work well, the players must adhere to the rules about building and selling. The best way to do that is to broker all transactions through the bank, and to have all auctions operated by a person who is not playing the game.
I encourage people do try this (and the Parker Brothers rules do as well). With a decent referee, Monopoly can become a very satisfying RPG.
It bothers me that there are people out there who *can't* smell it, especially given the timing, the breathless summary of barely-cited sources, and the advertisers.
Authorship, copyright, rights reserved under work-for-hire agreements, employment contracts, are all potentially very complex concerns that vary greatly depending on locale.
And you have asked for advice on a forum where the amateurs who think they know everything about the subject will be happy to respond, and the attorneys who practice labor, contract, and intellectual property law will neither be able to get a word in edgewise nor give anything but the most general advice, due to the very vague statement of your situation.
Perhaps before you start your next job you will have the foresight to arrange things so that your work is copyright you, all rights reserved to you, and licensed to the other party in your contract.
Then we can hear from THEM asking slashdot how they can abuse the careful terms of your license, rather than hearing from you about how you willingly entered into an abusive but legal labor situation.
For the first time since the very early 1980s, they are experiencing real pressure from competition on two fronts.
1. People who can't really afford the expensive mainstream operating systems and the expensive current hardware to run them, actually have viable free alternatives, and whether or not you think this amounts to a blip on their radar, it's there, and it represents millions of users.
2. A major competitor is very aggressively, and very successfully, going after a certain segment of the market: People who can both afford whatever they want and who are not afraid to try something different.
Yes, I am biased, as a Linux user (since kernel 0.99) and as an Apple user (since 1977).
The requirement of the boarding pass makes it sound like you took your complaint against some airport authority, as opposed to process that's handled by the Coast Guard.
In order to deny your claim, some individual had to sign an affadavit which was literally a sworn oath that the damage you claimed was not done. This, you can take to court.
They bought me a new laptop, and a new belt. It took longer to get the belt.
To me the holy grail of litigation would be, somebody gets sued by the RIAA or some other media establishment for broadcasting or downloading some content to which they themselves have all rights reserved.
I'd love to see that. And if it happened to me over my work, I'd parlay it into a comfortable retirement.
And copyright infringement is distinct from theft, no matter how badly the plaintiff wants to claim otherwise. Saying it's "theft" or "stealing" in a deposition would probably simply end your case.
>I was left with a new laptop with a broken latch, and a $200 repair bill to fix it.
>It's been done before. (approximately 70 years ago) Itty-bitty steps down a slippery slope; by the time >anyone notices, it's too late.
You didn't submit the claim form, and you're comparing that to... what exactly are you saying here?
There's a process where you swear that the damage was done, and it's routinely compensated. They can't do it at the airport, but the washington ppl do it. It's pretty much automatic.
Slashdot Mirror
"As a parent, there's no way in a hell a 7 year old will have a lock down to keep mom and dad out, no responsible parent will allow such a thing, and the machine gets taken away if such a practice is put into place."
I did not understand that point of view at 7, and I do not agree with it a 40-something.
It seems to go without saying that children are not entitled to privacy from their parents. I say it is up to the individual parent. Many parents DO respect their children enough to give them privacy. Some consider doing otherwise to be a form of abuse.
>I'd like to know how many people here have actually been taken to court, or taken someone else (a company) to
>court or other legal proceedings over what was said in an EULA.
None. Court cases involving software EULA's with the *consumer* as a party are vanishingly rare.
You may find conflicts between publishing and distribution companies, and the like, where cases were
settled on the basis of terms in one of these licenses.
There have been a few suits filed by consumers against companies, most famously against Microsoft.
There are VERY few rulings that directly speak to validity of terms in a specific EULA, most famous one I know of being the judgment against Network Associates that they COULD NOT suppress product reviews via EULA.
There is also the Sony/BMG lawsuit where, even if the user said "NO" to the license, the software (DRM codec with a serious security flaw) was installed anyway.
I think there have been some EULA cases with phone licenses. Ask one of the slashdot lawyers or law students. They should be the ones studying this stuff.
Thank you for your comment!
My perspective is from the other direction: Find some basis to "invalidate" the GPL (I love the saying "...untested in court..." as though it is important)... Find that legal basis and ALL software contracts derived from copyright law are invalidated as well. Essentially if the author does not have the rights needed to license under the terms of the GPL, then he does not have some of the rights that copyright supposedly grants.
One argument will be "without these licenses, software makers will not produce the products." We all know how unlikely that is. Besides it would be fine and dandy if the playing field were more open. Another argument is that vendors will have to go back to individual agreements with each customer. I wonder what would be so wrong with that? If you want me to sign a contract in order to use your product, by all means, put the contract in front of me, let me evaluate its terms side-by-side with its consideration, and I'll get back to you -- maybe your competition offers better terms. Maybe your big ugly contract influenced me during the critical moment when I was hot to buy, and now I'm not so sure.
FYI, the only software I've ever written for profit, did indeed have an individually negotiated contract with each client, and the legal terms were specified in that, and would be fully enforceable in the state where I was doing business.
But these mass-market software folks want to have all the power of an individual contract (actually, they want more than the assignee can legally grant via contract, sometimes), but they want none of the obligations, and want to offer no real consideration. EULA's won't stand up as contracts, in general.
The GPL on the other hand, holds if the grantor actually has the appropriate rights under copyright law.
In essence, to "Test the GPL in Court" and find it invalid, would mean invalidating *copyright law* to a certain degree. In other words, this is not going to happen.
Would have been awfully nice to see the GPL considered side-by-side with these other licenses.
Does the GPL also create an imbalance between the rights of the distributer and the rights of the consumer?
>Yes, he does seem to believe the hype that each copy means a lost sale.
Not a lost sale, exactly. Anyone who has taken a copy has made a purchase but the purchase price has not yet been collected. So it's not so much that "every copy" represents someone who "would have purchased", it represents a vast pool from which some people can be persuaded to pay - and this represents large potential gains.
>that hasn't stopped the DCMA from preventing people from talking about DRM hacks.
And precisely how did the DMCA prevent you from talking about them just then?
>Gimp is already pretty good in displaying .psds, but doesn't support criticals features like layer sets.
I wonder how many PS users would put that as the first item on their list of "critical features"
Layer sets are just a way of organizing layers into folders, correct?
I'm sure it's very handy to have. I'm also sure that every time I hear a Photoshop user raise an argument
against Gimp, it usually references some obscure feature that just makes the Gimp user shrug and continue
doing his graphics work with it.
The principal arguments in favor of Gimp are that it works really damn well for RGB editing, and that it
costs $0.
I think what you are saying is that there are features that a Photoshop user can put into a Photoshop file
that other programs do not support. I think the feature you mentioned isn't even supported by Elements or
pre-CS2 versions of Photoshop.
I have never heard anyone suggest that Gimp should be used in a professional situation where the client
expects you to use something else. Nobody said it would be an appropriate choice for you, in the scenario
you describe (I hope).
>I don't really think so. I'm seeing a lot of people moving to the Mac
When I saw the Macbook Pro I immediately switched from my Linux notebook
to Mac. There were a number of driving factors, but true portability
was high on the list. My notebook is on the large-ish size yet I am
easily able to carry it with me in my backpack - something I could not
say for my previous notebook. Also, battery life, and a guarantee of
hardware compatability between the OS and the wireless and video devices,
and the fact that the underlying OS was still a flavor of unix, all sold
me without hesitation.
My only annoyance so far after switching to Mac, has been the people who
tell me I shouldn't have done that (giving reasons why THEY wouldn't have,
or listing problems THEY have with OSX.) I just laugh... close my notebook
knowing that it will go to sleep properly... and walk away...
>I can wholeheartedly tell you, NOTHING is idiot-proof.
Yeah yeah, but the OP you are flaming is right. Linux, particularly Ubuntu Linux,
is a fine choice for deploying before the uneducated masses. Not only that, but the
whole premise of the article is faulty. Linux doesn't spread? Linux spreads so swiftly
and so thoroughly that there's not even a good idiom ("wildfire" stops at oceans and desert
regions!)
Where do people get the idea that Linux isn't being adopted?
Your message is all about "VP's" and "managers" and what not. Vanishingly few people in the
world are part of any corporate hierarchy. In your frame of reference, perhaps Linux is not
very popular. But that isn't stopping it from spreading.
"There have been so many executive orders, bending of laws, etc. that just about every form of government access to information is authorized by something."
Sounds fine on Slashdot, alt.politics groups, or black helicopter chat, but in reality you can't even try to go in with that position as a prosecutor. Even a conservative judge will hand you your ass.
The implication is that a mere law can change the "safety" of the people in a country in any meaningful way, and the frightening thing is that some of the people accept this premise.
>Notice how he carefully avoids saying anything about how people might need this device?
Anybody that NEEDS to cause discomfort to small children NEEDS to be locked up in a very unpleasant place, forever.
"I can't, however, imagine any way that I could play it that would make it what I would call a role-playing game."
No? You start out as a nearly bankrupt real estate speculator in an open market in Atlatic City...
even the utilities and rail transport are up for grabs... competing against *other* nearly bankrupt shysters.
When you introduce the element of barter among players, and the auctioning off of real estate to the highest bidder, all kinds of role play dynamics take shape. I'm not saying it's Shadowrun or GURPS, just that I can sometimes put it in the category of "vintage RPG," if played that way, to a limited degree.
>now try to imagine keeping it secure
Okay. We have had easy cryptographic solutions for decades now, many of which are reasonably difficult to break. Make use of them.
>It doesn't want to touch the NVidia video card.
This might not help you, but with NVidia cards, the Linux driver that NVidia distributes, works really well even for 3D gaming.
If you can get the desktop to start with the XFree driver or whatever (might be ugly), install the "restricted drivers" and that should get you the NVidia driver from their site.
It's not Ubuntu's fault, NVidia does not allow this driver to be redistributed nor do they provide complete specs to independent developers.
>Settlers isn't significantly (if any) more complex than Monopoly, imho.
I rarely find people who both know the rules of Monopoly and are willing to play the game by those rules.
Whenever I play Monopoly I choose to play banker/auctioneer/referee, and choose not to have an avatar on the board at all (so as to be disinterested and impartial).
When you play the game by the rules and with a designated banker, the game mechanics take a back seat and a role playing element emerges. Also, when you play the game without some of the common house rules, the game moves rapidly forward and tends to reach a conclusion in a shorter time. Many people, and to my experience *most* people have learned the game with house rules that were aimed at redistributing tax money with the goal of staving off bankruptcy, and this has a side effect of making the game much more random, and also, tends to force the game to run much longer than the design intends.
With a full-time banker, another element comes out, and that is a barter/auction economy. But in order for this to work well, the players must adhere to the rules about building and selling. The best way to do that is to broker all transactions through the bank, and to have all auctions operated by a person who is not playing the game.
I encourage people do try this (and the Parker Brothers rules do as well). With a decent referee, Monopoly can become a very satisfying RPG.
>I smell political propaganda.
It bothers me that there are people out there who *can't* smell it, especially given the timing, the breathless summary of barely-cited sources, and the advertisers.
The good old "No True Scotsman" argument.
Very persuasive. Bravo.
Authorship, copyright, rights reserved under work-for-hire agreements, employment contracts, are all potentially very complex concerns that vary greatly depending on locale.
And you have asked for advice on a forum where the amateurs who think they know everything about the subject will be happy to respond, and the attorneys who practice labor, contract, and intellectual property law will neither be able to get a word in edgewise nor give anything but the most general advice, due to the very vague statement of your situation.
Perhaps before you start your next job you will have the foresight to arrange things so that your work is copyright you, all rights reserved to you, and licensed to the other party in your contract.
Then we can hear from THEM asking slashdot how they can abuse the careful terms of your license, rather than hearing from you about how you willingly entered into an abusive but legal labor situation.
>why did they release early?
For the first time since the very early 1980s, they are experiencing real pressure from competition on two fronts.
1. People who can't really afford the expensive mainstream operating systems and the expensive current hardware to run them, actually have viable free alternatives, and whether or not you think this amounts to a blip on their radar, it's there, and it represents millions of users.
2. A major competitor is very aggressively, and very successfully, going after a certain segment of the market: People who can both afford whatever they want and who are not afraid to try something different.
Yes, I am biased, as a Linux user (since kernel 0.99) and as an Apple user (since 1977).
The requirement of the boarding pass makes it sound like you took your complaint against some airport authority, as opposed to process that's handled by the Coast Guard.
In order to deny your claim, some individual had to sign an affadavit which was literally a sworn oath that the damage you claimed was not done. This, you can take to court.
They bought me a new laptop, and a new belt. It took longer to get the belt.
To me the holy grail of litigation would be, somebody gets sued by the RIAA or some other media establishment for broadcasting or downloading some content to which they themselves have all rights reserved.
I'd love to see that. And if it happened to me over my work, I'd parlay it into a comfortable retirement.
>stealing is stealing
And copyright infringement is distinct from theft, no matter how badly the plaintiff wants to claim otherwise. Saying it's "theft" or "stealing" in a deposition would probably simply end your case.
>the RIAA wants to force them to buy the whole album
I'm sure our definitions of the word "force" differ.
>I was left with a new laptop with a broken latch, and a $200 repair bill to fix it.
>It's been done before. (approximately 70 years ago) Itty-bitty steps down a slippery slope; by the time >anyone notices, it's too late.
You didn't submit the claim form, and you're comparing that to... what exactly are you saying here?
There's a process where you swear that the damage was done, and it's routinely compensated. They can't do it at the airport, but the washington ppl do it. It's pretty much automatic.