OS X doesn't come with root enabled by default. Giving your password can give said application su privileges, but won't be able to edit system files owned by root. They have to be well engineered daemons themselves to do something like this. And it all starts with the person using the computer typing in their password to install something dodgy.
On the other hand, I can restore all the system files easily by reinstalling the system, and they don't contain anything that is secret. It is user files that are at danger. If you have a server used by 100 users it's really nice if some malware can hose only the idiot user who installed it and can' get at the 99 other users. But on a personal computer with a single user, malware that can access "only" the data of the single user can access _everything_ that is of any value.
I know it's not the same thing, but I wonder what the result would be if a similar study were done on burglary ? It might show it's good for the economy (growth in replacement sales, higher turnover for insurance companies etc.) even though some group (householders) suffer a little. Given that politicians currently want us to spend our savings, maybe they'd even see it as a good thing and give burglars a tax break or something ? After all, they're happy to help the thieves in the stock market.
1. Burglars usually pay taxes on their illicit income.
2. When caught, we usually give them a break where they don't need to pay taxes.
On a more serious note, burglary usually involves damage to property, it usually involves selling goods to people who value it less than the rightful owner, which means additional destruction of perceived value, it destroys money through the cost of employing policemen and insurance people, and the most damaging aspect is to the welfare of people who suddenly value their home much less than they used to. This is some very serious damage to the total welfare of the population.
On the other hand, duplicating music actually increases the total welfare of society, because goods that can be produced at really low costs end up actually being produced. Yes, it is unfair to some, but the total population is better off.
If a burglar could steal your grandmas jewellery and make 1000 copies of it and give it away for free, I might very well look at burglary in a different light. But he can't, so I don't.
I assume germany has laws that allow return of merchandise. If this is the case, return it. On can say that once a package is unzipped, then the EULA applies, but this has been a worlwide issue with the EULA. How many rights can you sign away just by opening up a package. Do I have to give my first born child to the company just because I install some software?
You have the right to return the goods ad cancel your contract within fourteen days; these fourteen days start when you have been told about the contract and your right to cancel the contract. Assuming that she hasn't been told about here rights, she will automatically meet this requirement. I'd add a copy of the software on CD and return it:-) In German:
(Ort und Datum)
Hiermit widerrufe ich auf Grund von 355 BGB jegliche Verträge mit ihnen. Da sie mich bisher auf keine Weise auf mein Widerrufsrecht hingewiesen haben, findet dieser Widerruf fristgerecht statt. Die Software sende ich Ihnen mit der beiligenden CD zurück.
Unterschrift (Your signature goes here)
Bezeugt (Someone elses signature so they don't get any funny ideas)
Then send it "per Einschreiben mit Rückschein".
It's not difficult to put a checksum in as well. Even just a string length counter that invalidates the file if it doesn't match would defeat a lot of your more basic "I can open it in Notepad and see my email address, so lets delete it" 'hackers'.
Except that Apple doesn't do this do deter evil hackers, but so that iTunes can display a playlist "purchased music" and can display your purchase history when you select a file and click on "Info".
Should you be taken to court on claims that music with your email address has turned up on the Internet, just post here, and someone will write a tool that allows you to enter the judges name and email address, and which then changes all your purchased music to his name and email address.
The law says nothing of the kind. It is something the lawyers for the RIAA and the MPAA made up out of whole cloth.
Seems I didn't watch out. The rights of the copyright owner are (#4 to #6 are not interesting here):
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
Somewhere else it says:
"Publication" is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes publication.
So the facts are:
1. "Publication" is some term used somewhere in copyright law, probably for some good reason.
2. "Distribution" by someone other than the copyright holder is illegal.
3. "Distribution" constitutes "Publication"
4. "Offer to distribute" constitutes "Publication"
The faulty conclusion is that "Publication" by someone other than the copyright holder and therefore "Offer to distribute" by someone other than the copyright holder is always illegal. If the lawmakers would have wanted that "making available" is illegal then they would have added the a sentence similar to "The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes distribution" to (3) above. They didn't.
Hell I'd put something in the EULA saying that the company is not liable for data loss due to running cracked versions of the program, or copies downloaded illegally.
You can put into the EULA what you want, your company is liable for criminal damage that it is causing intentionally.
I'd like somebody to please explain to me why my company should not compile versions of our software for torrent that do horrible and terrible things to the downloaders' PCs after say, the third run. We have no duty of care nor contract with such downloaders...
"No duty of care" is not the same as "criminal vigilante actions are illegal". I recommend you talk to your manager, and if he can't convince you, talk to your companies legal department. If they can't convince you, I'd say it is safest for your company to let you go.
That is a very poor analogy for the downloading of files for the reason that MediaSentry can actually download the files being offered for distribution. When thy are, in fact, distributed to the public which MediaSentry by rights should be taken as, that's distribution. The fact that the downloader is employed by the RIAA shouldn't change the fact that the download could happen from anyone.
In other words, the RIAA created the offence in the first place.
The fact that the downloader is employed by the RIAA means the only proven download has been done on orders from the RIAA. There are no reasonable grounds to believe that anyone was interested in downloading the music except someone who was hired to find evidence of downloading.
Making available would need to be MUCH better defined or it could lead to some real nightmare lawsuits. Does a library "make available"? Does a video rental place "make available"? If you loan a CD to a friend, did you "make available"? If he rips and shares it, was your loaning it to him contributory "making available"?
The law actually doesn't use the term "making available". It uses the term "making available for distribution". I think this clearly means making copyrighted materials available to a person or company who is going to _distribute_ it, within the ordinary meaning in copyright law, which means something like selling it in a store. So if there is an offer, but no actual copying happens, then it may be illegal to offer copyrighted music to the buyer of a record chain (who would buy it with the intent of distributing it), but not illegal to offer it to a friend (who would use it for personal use). Of course if the friend accepts the offer and an illegal copy is made, that is different.
You see, the RIAA is still tricking you. They looked at the law, and misquoted it to a judge, who initially fell for that trick, and everybody is _still_ discussing the misquoted term when it is blatantly obvious that "making records available to individuals for personal use" is not the same as "making available for distribution".
Come on, it isn't that hard to make a user removeable battery. Just do it -- people want it. It is a freaking laptop!
Who moderated this to "insightful"? If you had a quick look at www.apple.com/macbookpro/17inch-battery , you would find that by making it non-removable, Apple managed to make it 40% bigger in size. A user-removable battery takes more space for packaging the battery, more space for the mechanics to get it in and out, and more empty space inside the computer.
One thing to consider: If someone has survived a treatable form of pancreatic cancer, then it is quite possible that three years later they suffer from a completely unrelated illness. And if a dozen doctors all say "the guy had pancreatic cancer, and now how he has weight loss, so how does pancreatic cancer cause weight loss" they might completely miss the fact that one doesn't have anything to do with the other. So when you asked
Both the original code and the various corrections in the article don't catch what the algorithm is supposed to do, and therefore create code that is too complicated.
The essence of the algorithm is this: We start with number of days since 1/Jan/1980, with the first day having the number one. We want to end up with the correct year, with a day number relative to the first day of that year, with the first day again having the number one. So we set year = 1980. And as long as day is greater than the number of days in that year, we can't have the right value yet, so we change day and year accordingly. This produces a very simple loop:
for (;;) {
int daysInYear = IsLeapYear (year) ? 366 : 365;
if (day = daysInYear) break;
day -= daysInYear; year += 1; }
This is what Knuth called an "N + 1/2" loop: A loop pattern where a more or less substantial bit of code has to be executed at the beginning of the loop before we can decide whether the loop needs exiting or continuing. By following the "N+1/2 loop" pattern we avoid repeating the same code (with possible small changes) completely. And that exactly was the problem here: The same code was used twice but slightly differently (one set number of days = 365, the other made it dependent on whether the year was a leap year or not). The solutions given in the article all contain repeated code; either two loop exits, or a duplicated calculation of the number of days in a year.
Don't be the laughingstock of your friends when you shout 'Happy New Years' a second too early... this year will be exactly one second longer.
The original poster needs to be very, very careful. The leap second is introduced at midnight on the 31st of December in _UTC_ time. That is at midnight local time only in Iceland, Britain, Portugal and some west african countries.
But speaking for the UK, this is a country that celebrated the start of the third millenium one year too early, with one minister saying that this would be celebrating Jesus Christ's 2000th birthday (which is nonsense on multiple levels; if the catholic church had got all their calculations right that birthday would have been on Christmas 2001, but those calculations are all over the place), A country that wasted a billion dollars on the "Millenium Dome" and then closed it on the last day of the previous millenium!. If you try to celebrate the next year one second later than everybody else, they will just look at you as if you are a freak.
So using a 2 second rule seems pretty reasonable for your average safe driving. If you decide to cut below it you may be right that you can handle it, but it will be harder to make a case if something goes wrong.
The actual problem is that if your distance is less than two seconds, you have to brake a bit harder than the car in front of you. And if the guy behind you follows at less than 2 seconds distance, then he has to brake a bit harder again, and so has the next guy, and so on. So if there is a sequence of drivers driving too close, and the first one brakes, it may be the tenth or so who is in serious trouble.
Regarding the idiots who try to pass you on the wrong lane just after you have overtaken another vehicle: My first goal when driving is trying to survive. When I have someone right on my ass, I expect them to behave stupid. That means for example that after overtaking and indicating that I am changing lanes again, I will not change lanes immediately because that risks a collision with an idiot who decided just at that point in time to change lanes and accelerate like mad; instead I will wait until I am confident they will not be changing lanes. I also will change lanes slower than I would normally. Idiots following too close actually force me to drive in a way that costs them more time.
It also happens that people drive much too close to the next vehicle when they want to overtake and there is oncoming traffic. They don't realise that they make it actually harder for themselves to overtake. If you drive at a reasonable distance, you can accellerate when you notice a gap in the oncoming gap approaching, and when you move to the other lane to overtake, you already go at a higher speed than the car you are overtaking. If you follow too close, you can't do that. So when you move to the other lane, you are initially at the same speed as the car you are overtaking, so you need a much bigger gap to overtake.
Actually, according to the OS X EULA (http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macosx105.pdf) "This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time." When I bought my Macbook, it came with an Apple logo sticker. When I upgraded to 10.5, a similar decal came with the software. Perhaps a legal mind could explain to me in what way sticking one of these labels to a Hackintosh would make it anything other than an 'Apple-labeled computer'...
If the sticker turned it into an "Apple-labeled computer", then putting that sticker on the computer would be a trademark infringement. Apple has the exclusive right to create "Apple-labeled computers". You can argue that way, but you can't win.
Depends where you live. If you're in California or Texas, click-wrap licenses are not presented to you before you purchase, and have been ruled as not consented to.
See also USC Title 17 Â 117: In plain english, you are authorized to make a copy of software you have purchced, so long as it is necessary in order to use, or a backup for archival purposes, and provided that when you cease to have ownership of the copyright material, any copies created are destroyed, or transferred along with the original. Specifically, this means you are legally allowed to install software on your computer. It also means you are legally allowed to sell that computer so long as you provide a full copy of the software you've installed on it, and destroy any backup CDs you may have made.
And here is where your argument fails: You don't buy the software. You buy a box, a DVD, and a license. The license is not a restriction on how you can use the product, it _is_ the product. A box with a DVD and no license would be useless to you (unless you need some coasters), because you wouldn't have any permission to copy the data on the DVD. What you quote is for software purchases, not for software license purchases.
Someone that gets it! I'm often amazed by the amount of people who believe it's Apple's right to shut out the competition like this.
Including Judge William Alsup. A quote from his dismissal of Psystar's counterclaims: "Here, similarly, Apple customers must utilize Mac OS only in Apple-labeled computers because they agreed to do so when they purchased the product".
This is a really weird thread. Go to Amazon and buy the OS separately. No-one is stopping you. This is why Apple has a problem. Their problem is, they sell do OSX separately at retail. They then want to tell people what they can and cannot do with it, after they have bought it. This is exactly what is not going to fly.
You don't buy MacOS X from Amazon. You buy a box, a DVD with software on it, and a license that always you to make copies of the software in a certain way, but not others. The box, the DVD, and the license are yours. The software isn't. Nothing gives you permission to copy the software other than the license, and the license allows you to make a copy by installing the software on an Apple-labeled computer, and no other copies.
And yes, this is going to fly. It is going to fly in court where Psystar will be reduced to a bit of rubble. Actually, the court has already said that Apple is perfectly within its rights to make such a limitation in their license.
Might it be that Psystar can win on that part due to the Lexmark decision? Maybe. Or maybe they get their ass handed to them because the replacement for Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext is a clone of Apple's kext that contains the keys as constant data instead of pulling the keys from the SMC. Those keys are copyrighted and presumably specifically registered with the copyright office as a separate work from OS X.
Actually, that is I think the part where the DMCA act comes into it. These two keys are needed to decrypt certain copyrighted files in MacOS X. So it doesn't matter whether the keys are copyrighted themselves (and I don't think they can actually be copyrighted, because you have to use exactly those keys to make it work, so there is zero copyrightable "expression" of an idea). What matters is that you need to replace this kext to decrypt the files, and the DMCA act doesn't allow you to do this.
How would running software on non-approved hardware constitute copying said software?
Most of Apple's software would be copied during the installation process. Some small but important parts are actually stored in an encrypted form and are only created when they are copied into RAM; these parts are protected in the sense of the DMCA (there is a 64 bit key that is required in Apple's SMC chip).
But every software is _copied_ into RAM when you execute it. If you have a valid license, then it is fine. If you don't have a valid license, then every time you boot the OS you are committing copyright infringement by copying the software into RAM without license.
IANAL, but can they sue over a derived software product from a copyright registration for a previous version? How close does the newer version have to be to the older version?
Every single line that is unchanged from the previous version would be covered by the old copyright registration. Every single line that is changed would not be covered.
Pystar are trying to make that claim that the Mac OS X bootloader detects their hardware and refuses to run on it. That's illegal - so says the Supreme Court - as it denies competition. That is, you and I are required to buy a computer from Apple and only from Apple if we want it to run Mac OS X. What's more, the Lexmark case has declared that code written to enforce monopoly control is void of copyright. Pystar would really love to have Mac OS X stripped of copyright.. that would make their business model a whole lot more profitable.
In Lexmark, the court decided that a fifteen byte program, that had to be written in exactly that way not for technical reasons but because the hardware calculated a checksum, had no copyright. Copyright is on the _expression_ of an idea; if there are limits that are so strong that something cannot be expressed in any other way, there can be no copyright. MacOS X is hundreds of megabytes of code, and there are hundreds of megabytes that could have been written in a different way and are therefore protectable.
What you say about the Supreme Court is nonsense. The law protects competition - it doesn't protect competitors. Even in the case where a company has a monopoly, it is under no obligation to help its competitors compete. For example, Xerox had for a long time an unbeatable monopoly due to their plain paper photocopying process. There was no competitor coming close. Yet, even though Xerox _had_ a monopoly, a competitor could not force them to license their patents.
Apple can do whatever they want with their software, including tying it to Apple hardware, as long as they don't have a monopoly in either the operating system market (where Microsoft has 90% market share) or in the computer market (where Dell and HP sell significantly more than Apple).
For someone who writes an OSS app, typically the actual damages are zero, since the product isn't being sold for money.
That is blatantly wrong. The product isn't licensed for money, but for behaviour in a way that advances Open Source software. Therefore, distributing Open Source software without source code causes massive damages.
As an example: Apple itself distributes the gcc compiler suite. As a result, Apple has to follow the terms of the GPL for the gcc compiler. Apple could instead have contacted the FSF and asked for a license to distribute gcc without the GPL. If we assumed that the FSF would make such a decision on purely commercial grounds (which they wouldn't, but that is irrelevant here), they would probably ask at least for something around $10,000,000. The actual damages are _at least_ what a reasonable commercial enterprise would have charged for the software.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a PC. I've always been a PC at heart.
And it was funny, in a rather pointless way, when you posted it the first time. Now the joke is getting old.
OS X doesn't come with root enabled by default. Giving your password can give said application su privileges, but won't be able to edit system files owned by root. They have to be well engineered daemons themselves to do something like this. And it all starts with the person using the computer typing in their password to install something dodgy.
On the other hand, I can restore all the system files easily by reinstalling the system, and they don't contain anything that is secret. It is user files that are at danger. If you have a server used by 100 users it's really nice if some malware can hose only the idiot user who installed it and can' get at the 99 other users. But on a personal computer with a single user, malware that can access "only" the data of the single user can access _everything_ that is of any value.
I know it's not the same thing, but I wonder what the result would be if a similar study were done on burglary ? It might show it's good for the economy (growth in replacement sales, higher turnover for insurance companies etc.) even though some group (householders) suffer a little. Given that politicians currently want us to spend our savings, maybe they'd even see it as a good thing and give burglars a tax break or something ? After all, they're happy to help the thieves in the stock market.
1. Burglars usually pay taxes on their illicit income.
2. When caught, we usually give them a break where they don't need to pay taxes.
On a more serious note, burglary usually involves damage to property, it usually involves selling goods to people who value it less than the rightful owner, which means additional destruction of perceived value, it destroys money through the cost of employing policemen and insurance people, and the most damaging aspect is to the welfare of people who suddenly value their home much less than they used to. This is some very serious damage to the total welfare of the population.
On the other hand, duplicating music actually increases the total welfare of society, because goods that can be produced at really low costs end up actually being produced. Yes, it is unfair to some, but the total population is better off.
If a burglar could steal your grandmas jewellery and make 1000 copies of it and give it away for free, I might very well look at burglary in a different light. But he can't, so I don't.
I assume germany has laws that allow return of merchandise. If this is the case, return it. On can say that once a package is unzipped, then the EULA applies, but this has been a worlwide issue with the EULA. How many rights can you sign away just by opening up a package. Do I have to give my first born child to the company just because I install some software?
You have the right to return the goods ad cancel your contract within fourteen days; these fourteen days start when you have been told about the contract and your right to cancel the contract. Assuming that she hasn't been told about here rights, she will automatically meet this requirement. I'd add a copy of the software on CD and return it :-) In German:
(Ort und Datum)
Hiermit widerrufe ich auf Grund von 355 BGB jegliche Verträge mit ihnen. Da sie mich bisher auf keine Weise auf mein Widerrufsrecht hingewiesen haben, findet dieser Widerruf fristgerecht statt. Die Software sende ich Ihnen mit der beiligenden CD zurück.
Unterschrift (Your signature goes here)
Bezeugt (Someone elses signature so they don't get any funny ideas)
Then send it "per Einschreiben mit Rückschein".
It's not difficult to put a checksum in as well. Even just a string length counter that invalidates the file if it doesn't match would defeat a lot of your more basic "I can open it in Notepad and see my email address, so lets delete it" 'hackers'.
Except that Apple doesn't do this do deter evil hackers, but so that iTunes can display a playlist "purchased music" and can display your purchase history when you select a file and click on "Info". Should you be taken to court on claims that music with your email address has turned up on the Internet, just post here, and someone will write a tool that allows you to enter the judges name and email address, and which then changes all your purchased music to his name and email address.
The law says nothing of the kind. It is something the lawyers for the RIAA and the MPAA made up out of whole cloth.
Seems I didn't watch out. The rights of the copyright owner are (#4 to #6 are not interesting here):
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
Somewhere else it says:
"Publication" is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes publication.
So the facts are:
1. "Publication" is some term used somewhere in copyright law, probably for some good reason.
2. "Distribution" by someone other than the copyright holder is illegal.
3. "Distribution" constitutes "Publication"
4. "Offer to distribute" constitutes "Publication"
The faulty conclusion is that "Publication" by someone other than the copyright holder and therefore "Offer to distribute" by someone other than the copyright holder is always illegal. If the lawmakers would have wanted that "making available" is illegal then they would have added the a sentence similar to "The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes distribution" to (3) above. They didn't.
Hell I'd put something in the EULA saying that the company is not liable for data loss due to running cracked versions of the program, or copies downloaded illegally.
You can put into the EULA what you want, your company is liable for criminal damage that it is causing intentionally.
I'd like somebody to please explain to me why my company should not compile versions of our software for torrent that do horrible and terrible things to the downloaders' PCs after say, the third run. We have no duty of care nor contract with such downloaders ...
"No duty of care" is not the same as "criminal vigilante actions are illegal". I recommend you talk to your manager, and if he can't convince you, talk to your companies legal department. If they can't convince you, I'd say it is safest for your company to let you go.
That is a very poor analogy for the downloading of files for the reason that MediaSentry can actually download the files being offered for distribution. When thy are, in fact, distributed to the public which MediaSentry by rights should be taken as, that's distribution. The fact that the downloader is employed by the RIAA shouldn't change the fact that the download could happen from anyone.
In other words, the RIAA created the offence in the first place.
The fact that the downloader is employed by the RIAA means the only proven download has been done on orders from the RIAA. There are no reasonable grounds to believe that anyone was interested in downloading the music except someone who was hired to find evidence of downloading.
Making available would need to be MUCH better defined or it could lead to some real nightmare lawsuits. Does a library "make available"? Does a video rental place "make available"? If you loan a CD to a friend, did you "make available"? If he rips and shares it, was your loaning it to him contributory "making available"?
The law actually doesn't use the term "making available". It uses the term "making available for distribution". I think this clearly means making copyrighted materials available to a person or company who is going to _distribute_ it, within the ordinary meaning in copyright law, which means something like selling it in a store. So if there is an offer, but no actual copying happens, then it may be illegal to offer copyrighted music to the buyer of a record chain (who would buy it with the intent of distributing it), but not illegal to offer it to a friend (who would use it for personal use). Of course if the friend accepts the offer and an illegal copy is made, that is different.
You see, the RIAA is still tricking you. They looked at the law, and misquoted it to a judge, who initially fell for that trick, and everybody is _still_ discussing the misquoted term when it is blatantly obvious that "making records available to individuals for personal use" is not the same as "making available for distribution".
Come on, it isn't that hard to make a user removeable battery. Just do it -- people want it. It is a freaking laptop!
Who moderated this to "insightful"? If you had a quick look at www.apple.com/macbookpro/17inch-battery , you would find that by making it non-removable, Apple managed to make it 40% bigger in size. A user-removable battery takes more space for packaging the battery, more space for the mechanics to get it in and out, and more empty space inside the computer.
Is this malnutrition or cancer-related cachexia
then maybe it is neither?
It's a bug in the Slashdot software, eating "less than" and "greater than" characters in "Plain Old Text" mode.
Both the original code and the various corrections in the article don't catch what the algorithm is supposed to do, and therefore create code that is too complicated.
The essence of the algorithm is this: We start with number of days since 1/Jan/1980, with the first day having the number one. We want to end up with the correct year, with a day number relative to the first day of that year, with the first day again having the number one. So we set year = 1980. And as long as day is greater than the number of days in that year, we can't have the right value yet, so we change day and year accordingly. This produces a very simple loop:
for (;;) {
int daysInYear = IsLeapYear (year) ? 366 : 365;
if (day = daysInYear) break;
day -= daysInYear; year += 1;
}
This is what Knuth called an "N + 1/2" loop: A loop pattern where a more or less substantial bit of code has to be executed at the beginning of the loop before we can decide whether the loop needs exiting or continuing. By following the "N+1/2 loop" pattern we avoid repeating the same code (with possible small changes) completely. And that exactly was the problem here: The same code was used twice but slightly differently (one set number of days = 365, the other made it dependent on whether the year was a leap year or not). The solutions given in the article all contain repeated code; either two loop exits, or a duplicated calculation of the number of days in a year.
Don't be the laughingstock of your friends when you shout 'Happy New Years' a second too early ... this year will be exactly one second longer.
The original poster needs to be very, very careful. The leap second is introduced at midnight on the 31st of December in _UTC_ time. That is at midnight local time only in Iceland, Britain, Portugal and some west african countries.
But speaking for the UK, this is a country that celebrated the start of the third millenium one year too early, with one minister saying that this would be celebrating Jesus Christ's 2000th birthday (which is nonsense on multiple levels; if the catholic church had got all their calculations right that birthday would have been on Christmas 2001, but those calculations are all over the place), A country that wasted a billion dollars on the "Millenium Dome" and then closed it on the last day of the previous millenium!. If you try to celebrate the next year one second later than everybody else, they will just look at you as if you are a freak.
So using a 2 second rule seems pretty reasonable for your average safe driving. If you decide to cut below it you may be right that you can handle it, but it will be harder to make a case if something goes wrong.
The actual problem is that if your distance is less than two seconds, you have to brake a bit harder than the car in front of you. And if the guy behind you follows at less than 2 seconds distance, then he has to brake a bit harder again, and so has the next guy, and so on. So if there is a sequence of drivers driving too close, and the first one brakes, it may be the tenth or so who is in serious trouble.
Regarding the idiots who try to pass you on the wrong lane just after you have overtaken another vehicle: My first goal when driving is trying to survive. When I have someone right on my ass, I expect them to behave stupid. That means for example that after overtaking and indicating that I am changing lanes again, I will not change lanes immediately because that risks a collision with an idiot who decided just at that point in time to change lanes and accelerate like mad; instead I will wait until I am confident they will not be changing lanes. I also will change lanes slower than I would normally. Idiots following too close actually force me to drive in a way that costs them more time.
It also happens that people drive much too close to the next vehicle when they want to overtake and there is oncoming traffic. They don't realise that they make it actually harder for themselves to overtake. If you drive at a reasonable distance, you can accellerate when you notice a gap in the oncoming gap approaching, and when you move to the other lane to overtake, you already go at a higher speed than the car you are overtaking. If you follow too close, you can't do that. So when you move to the other lane, you are initially at the same speed as the car you are overtaking, so you need a much bigger gap to overtake.
Actually, according to the OS X EULA (http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macosx105.pdf) "This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time." When I bought my Macbook, it came with an Apple logo sticker. When I upgraded to 10.5, a similar decal came with the software. Perhaps a legal mind could explain to me in what way sticking one of these labels to a Hackintosh would make it anything other than an 'Apple-labeled computer'...
If the sticker turned it into an "Apple-labeled computer", then putting that sticker on the computer would be a trademark infringement. Apple has the exclusive right to create "Apple-labeled computers". You can argue that way, but you can't win.
Depends where you live. If you're in California or Texas, click-wrap licenses are not presented to you before you purchase, and have been ruled as not consented to.
See also USC Title 17 Â 117: In plain english, you are authorized to make a copy of software you have purchced, so long as it is necessary in order to use, or a backup for archival purposes, and provided that when you cease to have ownership of the copyright material, any copies created are destroyed, or transferred along with the original. Specifically, this means you are legally allowed to install software on your computer. It also means you are legally allowed to sell that computer so long as you provide a full copy of the software you've installed on it, and destroy any backup CDs you may have made.
And here is where your argument fails: You don't buy the software. You buy a box, a DVD, and a license. The license is not a restriction on how you can use the product, it _is_ the product. A box with a DVD and no license would be useless to you (unless you need some coasters), because you wouldn't have any permission to copy the data on the DVD. What you quote is for software purchases, not for software license purchases.
Someone that gets it! I'm often amazed by the amount of people who believe it's Apple's right to shut out the competition like this.
Including Judge William Alsup. A quote from his dismissal of Psystar's counterclaims: "Here, similarly, Apple customers must utilize Mac OS only in Apple-labeled computers because they agreed to do so when they purchased the product".
This is a really weird thread. Go to Amazon and buy the OS separately. No-one is stopping you. This is why Apple has a problem. Their problem is, they sell do OSX separately at retail. They then want to tell people what they can and cannot do with it, after they have bought it. This is exactly what is not going to fly.
You don't buy MacOS X from Amazon. You buy a box, a DVD with software on it, and a license that always you to make copies of the software in a certain way, but not others. The box, the DVD, and the license are yours. The software isn't. Nothing gives you permission to copy the software other than the license, and the license allows you to make a copy by installing the software on an Apple-labeled computer, and no other copies.
And yes, this is going to fly. It is going to fly in court where Psystar will be reduced to a bit of rubble. Actually, the court has already said that Apple is perfectly within its rights to make such a limitation in their license.
Might it be that Psystar can win on that part due to the Lexmark decision? Maybe. Or maybe they get their ass handed to them because the replacement for Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext is a clone of Apple's kext that contains the keys as constant data instead of pulling the keys from the SMC. Those keys are copyrighted and presumably specifically registered with the copyright office as a separate work from OS X.
Actually, that is I think the part where the DMCA act comes into it. These two keys are needed to decrypt certain copyrighted files in MacOS X. So it doesn't matter whether the keys are copyrighted themselves (and I don't think they can actually be copyrighted, because you have to use exactly those keys to make it work, so there is zero copyrightable "expression" of an idea). What matters is that you need to replace this kext to decrypt the files, and the DMCA act doesn't allow you to do this.
How would running software on non-approved hardware constitute copying said software?
Most of Apple's software would be copied during the installation process. Some small but important parts are actually stored in an encrypted form and are only created when they are copied into RAM; these parts are protected in the sense of the DMCA (there is a 64 bit key that is required in Apple's SMC chip).
But every software is _copied_ into RAM when you execute it. If you have a valid license, then it is fine. If you don't have a valid license, then every time you boot the OS you are committing copyright infringement by copying the software into RAM without license.
IANAL, but can they sue over a derived software product from a copyright registration for a previous version? How close does the newer version have to be to the older version?
Every single line that is unchanged from the previous version would be covered by the old copyright registration. Every single line that is changed would not be covered.
Pystar are trying to make that claim that the Mac OS X bootloader detects their hardware and refuses to run on it. That's illegal - so says the Supreme Court - as it denies competition. That is, you and I are required to buy a computer from Apple and only from Apple if we want it to run Mac OS X. What's more, the Lexmark case has declared that code written to enforce monopoly control is void of copyright. Pystar would really love to have Mac OS X stripped of copyright.. that would make their business model a whole lot more profitable.
In Lexmark, the court decided that a fifteen byte program, that had to be written in exactly that way not for technical reasons but because the hardware calculated a checksum, had no copyright. Copyright is on the _expression_ of an idea; if there are limits that are so strong that something cannot be expressed in any other way, there can be no copyright. MacOS X is hundreds of megabytes of code, and there are hundreds of megabytes that could have been written in a different way and are therefore protectable.
What you say about the Supreme Court is nonsense. The law protects competition - it doesn't protect competitors. Even in the case where a company has a monopoly, it is under no obligation to help its competitors compete. For example, Xerox had for a long time an unbeatable monopoly due to their plain paper photocopying process. There was no competitor coming close. Yet, even though Xerox _had_ a monopoly, a competitor could not force them to license their patents.
Apple can do whatever they want with their software, including tying it to Apple hardware, as long as they don't have a monopoly in either the operating system market (where Microsoft has 90% market share) or in the computer market (where Dell and HP sell significantly more than Apple).
For someone who writes an OSS app, typically the actual damages are zero, since the product isn't being sold for money.
That is blatantly wrong. The product isn't licensed for money, but for behaviour in a way that advances Open Source software. Therefore, distributing Open Source software without source code causes massive damages.
As an example: Apple itself distributes the gcc compiler suite. As a result, Apple has to follow the terms of the GPL for the gcc compiler. Apple could instead have contacted the FSF and asked for a license to distribute gcc without the GPL. If we assumed that the FSF would make such a decision on purely commercial grounds (which they wouldn't, but that is irrelevant here), they would probably ask at least for something around $10,000,000. The actual damages are _at least_ what a reasonable commercial enterprise would have charged for the software.