I have never seen a EULA that performed any sort of age verification (and it would certainly be difficult if not impossible) on the person installing it, yet the courts have upheld that the EULA is a binding contract. It is illegal to enter into a binding, legal contract with a minor, and the contact itself is null and void.
This in itself may be enough to get rid of UCITA, unless the courts would then make a parent or legal guardian responsible for their child's adherence to the EULA. However, the child is still "signing" the contract and contract law forbids children to sign...this "signature" of a mouse click is worth nothing because this isn't a real signature that can be: analyzed for age (ink can be dated rather well, especially black ink), checked for forgery through handwriting analysis, or proven by the security of a true electronic signature's password requirement, tamper-protection, and mathematical correlation with a registered profile. Anyone could have "signed" the "acceptance." The mouse button could have stuck or the cat walked on the Enter key while you were on the phone with your lawyer talking about the EULA. Who knows. It's worthless, and ridiculous overturnings of hundreds of years' of legal precedence such as this just highlights how clearly UCITA was a piece of legislation that was bought and paid for, rather than created out of a legitimate need.
I haven't had a good Piss And Moan here yet....this is as good a time as any.
Yes, this is old news. I was booting people out of IRC channels for (unknowingly) sending LINKS.VBS over a year ago. It's ancient. It's the grandaddy of VBS worms. Here are the last four articles I submitted to Slashdot:
1) An article about a proposal, part of the U.S./European Cybercrime Treaty, that may affect (ie ban) certain parts of Linux...namely those use by admins. to break passwords or examine networks.
2) Right after a page with one set of instructions on de-regionalizing one DVD player was posted, a post with a link to a page with...37 of them. Code-free.
3) An article on how a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists managed to make clones biologically younger, not older, then the cells they were cloned from. A major breakthrough.
4) An article about how the U.S. has pushed through stiffer sentencing for minor, profitless copyright violation (ie using Napster) and Napster and IRC are being actively monitored byt the FBI...with the stated intention of throwing people in jail for trading MP3's.
All of these were linked to reputable sources, and were rejected outright, but this stinker slipped through. Want to read the above articles? Well, I lost the URL's. Sorry. I am sure you will find them if you look. Linux users complain that they aren't understood by Windows users...here is en excellent example of the reverse...
Suggestion? Allow higher-karma people with real e-mail addresses and names to post <B>stories</B>, not just stinkin' comments....moderators can moderate stories and comments up or down. That way, this non-issue would have been flushed down the -1 toilet quickly and would not have wasted our time.
You don't need a new formulation or interpretation of the General Theory of Relativity to come to this conclusion either. This has been known for many years. Still, people, including many scientists make the error that a star can collapse to a point of zero size, as seen from our timeframe. This is not possible. As a star collapses, it is subject to its own gravitational time-dilation. The collapse, as seen from outside, would appear to slow down the closer the star became to its own event horizon, with this boundary as the limiting condition. It would take infinitely long to actually reach it. In order to see the star collapse to zero, you would have to match its timeframe, by jumping into it! (and living! Also, an infinite amount of time would pass outside, so the universe would end and you would have no way of telling anyone your discoveries.) So, a more correct (and commonly used) term for a black hole is a "frozen star." This is also the title of an excellent book by astrophysicist George Greenstein which introduced this idea to a wide audience.
It is still an open-ended question whether these processes would still be upheld in the creation of "primeval" black holes that really are of point size, or at least smaller than their event horizons, that were created by the Big Bang.
When I was a junior in high school, and was first exposed to academic computing, the first thing any student had to do was learn machine language. By doing this, you were finding out how the machine actually worked, at the lowest and most basic level (ie binary, hexadecimal, registers, interrupts, memory constructs, et al.)
Now, rather than being taught the basics, students are being first exposed to how to use proprietary applications, and slowly learning how they really work is becoming criminalized via the DMCA et al. Thus, they are locked into those proprietary standards and applications (for the rest of their lives if the comapanies who make the applications have their way.) Unfortunately, computers are a very useful portal for companies, previously limited by the regulation on advertising or brand-name bias in education, to get their "message" through. Targeting through product name recognition is not accidental as we have seen through Microsoft's efforts to entice U.S. universities to replace UNIX-based servers with NT ones by offering contributions which are no better than bribes.
As well, I don't really buy the argument that a five-year-old needs a 700 MHz system and that a 300 won't do, or that every high-school student needs a laptop. Again, this idea is pushed on us by marketing departments. Computer literacy, like new math, is a vastly overrated and money-wasteful idea if the literacy is not built on a base of critical and rational thinking, and a solid foundation of computational first-principles. I have spoken to enough people who have used computers for many years and still call their computer "the hard drive" to know this, and spending billions so that young people can learn how to push a mouse around, which teaches them absolutely nothing, billions that could be spent on maths, sciences and languages, is folly. But it makes someone a lot of money.
Even at $500 apiece, one laptop will be worth 10 textbooks.
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I have never seen a EULA that performed any sort of age verification (and it would certainly be difficult if not impossible) on the person installing it, yet the courts have upheld that the EULA is a binding contract. It is illegal to enter into a binding, legal contract with a minor, and the contact itself is null and void.
This in itself may be enough to get rid of UCITA, unless the courts would then make a parent or legal guardian responsible for their child's adherence to the EULA. However, the child is still "signing" the contract and contract law forbids children to sign...this "signature" of a mouse click is worth nothing because this isn't a real signature that can be: analyzed for age (ink can be dated rather well, especially black ink), checked for forgery through handwriting analysis, or proven by the security of a true electronic signature's password requirement, tamper-protection, and mathematical correlation with a registered profile. Anyone could have "signed" the "acceptance." The mouse button could have stuck or the cat walked on the Enter key while you were on the phone with your lawyer talking about the EULA. Who knows. It's worthless, and ridiculous overturnings of hundreds of years' of legal precedence such as this just highlights how clearly UCITA was a piece of legislation that was bought and paid for, rather than created out of a legitimate need.
Perhaps someone misunderstood the term "network engineer."
I haven't had a good Piss And Moan here yet....this is as good a time as any.
Yes, this is old news. I was booting people out of IRC channels for (unknowingly) sending LINKS.VBS over a year ago. It's ancient. It's the grandaddy of VBS worms. Here are the last four articles I submitted to Slashdot:
1) An article about a proposal, part of the U.S./European Cybercrime Treaty, that may affect (ie ban) certain parts of Linux...namely those use by admins. to break passwords or examine networks.
2) Right after a page with one set of instructions on de-regionalizing one DVD player was posted, a post with a link to a page with...37 of them. Code-free.
3) An article on how a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists managed to make clones biologically younger, not older, then the cells they were cloned from. A major breakthrough.
4) An article about how the U.S. has pushed through stiffer sentencing for minor, profitless copyright violation (ie using Napster) and Napster and IRC are being actively monitored byt the FBI...with the stated intention of throwing people in jail for trading MP3's.
All of these were linked to reputable sources, and were rejected outright, but this stinker slipped through. Want to read the above articles? Well, I lost the URL's. Sorry. I am sure you will find them if you look. Linux users complain that they aren't understood by Windows users...here is en excellent example of the reverse...
Suggestion? Allow higher-karma people with real e-mail addresses and names to post <B>stories</B>, not just stinkin' comments....moderators can moderate stories and comments up or down. That way, this non-issue would have been flushed down the -1 toilet quickly and would not have wasted our time.
You don't need a new formulation or interpretation of the General Theory of Relativity to come to this conclusion either. This has been known for many years. Still, people, including many scientists make the error that a star can collapse to a point of zero size, as seen from our timeframe. This is not possible. As a star collapses, it is subject to its own gravitational time-dilation. The collapse, as seen from outside, would appear to slow down the closer the star became to its own event horizon, with this boundary as the limiting condition. It would take infinitely long to actually reach it. In order to see the star collapse to zero, you would have to match its timeframe, by jumping into it! (and living! Also, an infinite amount of time would pass outside, so the universe would end and you would have no way of telling anyone your discoveries.) So, a more correct (and commonly used) term for a black hole is a "frozen star." This is also the title of an excellent book by astrophysicist George Greenstein which introduced this idea to a wide audience.
It is still an open-ended question whether these processes would still be upheld in the creation of "primeval" black holes that really are of point size, or at least smaller than their event horizons, that were created by the Big Bang.
When I was a junior in high school, and was first exposed to academic computing, the first thing any student had to do was learn machine language. By doing this, you were finding out how the machine actually worked, at the lowest and most basic level (ie binary, hexadecimal, registers, interrupts, memory constructs, et al.)
Now, rather than being taught the basics, students are being first exposed to how to use proprietary applications, and slowly learning how they really work is becoming criminalized via the DMCA et al. Thus, they are locked into those proprietary standards and applications (for the rest of their lives if the comapanies who make the applications have their way.) Unfortunately, computers are a very useful portal for companies, previously limited by the regulation on advertising or brand-name bias in education, to get their "message" through. Targeting through product name recognition is not accidental as we have seen through Microsoft's efforts to entice U.S. universities to replace UNIX-based servers with NT ones by offering contributions which are no better than bribes.
As well, I don't really buy the argument that a five-year-old needs a 700 MHz system and that a 300 won't do, or that every high-school student needs a laptop. Again, this idea is pushed on us by marketing departments. Computer literacy, like new math, is a vastly overrated and money-wasteful idea if the literacy is not built on a base of critical and rational thinking, and a solid foundation of computational first-principles. I have spoken to enough people who have used computers for many years and still call their computer "the hard drive" to know this, and spending billions so that young people can learn how to push a mouse around, which teaches them absolutely nothing, billions that could be spent on maths, sciences and languages, is folly. But it makes someone a lot of money.
Even at $500 apiece, one laptop will be worth 10 textbooks.