Problem is obvious if you've ever been in a Fortune 500 senior management meeting making an investment decision. You have one proposal portrayed in too exhaustive detail for you to be able to see the assumptions. What you need is a few likely scenarios in little enough detail that you can debate the assumptions. Then you have the result presented in PPT slides which you have not seen before, where after the fact you have no idea why the group decided what they did. Or often, even what they decided. What you actually want is prose, which everyone has read in advance, which makes the thing crystal clear: what, why, how.
Solution: keep Excel in Accounting. Do business decision making with 5 page written papers, 1 page of financials, max 3 graphics. No overheads except the graphics. It works.
Farewell Steve Jobs the charismatic preacher Whose first vocation was perhaps Guyana That sunlit clearing where the waiting crowd Wept as they drank and died, and he died later. But Woz and Sculley, illness, resurrection The cheering lost familial annual crowds Saved him from all that. Now he has died The Cupertino crowds that lined the streets Through which his train with black clad mourners flowed Could half not know they had been acolytes. They strewed the road before him with their flowers Something of loveliness had left their lives They'd not so much believed as felt a pull Where buying was belonging, using meant A spiritual rapture and a state of grace Inclined without necessity. There, freedom Seemed to be perfected in his will. But turn turn away now, turn you now and climb. Off board the pastel roaring bird your ashes Drift as a grey cloud into the waves They cannot hear your funeral elegies That blend of Zen, Far Eastern and New Age That spiritual pride is all forgotten now And whether it was cult, religion, commerce Will not long trouble now the primeval ooze Or settling dust of what was once a man.
Its not every few months. The time between recurrences is said to be in years. Its certainly true that total cessation of testosterone must be unpleasant. Though probably bearable if you know its only for a year or so. It has its own dangers also, notably osteoporosis. However, its not that its good. Its whether it may be the best of the alternatives.
This is an issue for every man over 65 or so. Its an issue for a some men between 50 and 65, and for very few under 50. But if you have a father, its going to be an issue for him.
The problem is that you can diagnose the condition fairly well. You can do PSA tests, particularly free PSA, and you can take biopsies. The thing you can't do is predict very well from these tests how vigorous the cancer is. Now, this might not matter if the treatments were fairly benign, and if they were highly sucessful. But they are not. The side effects of all physical treatments, including radiation, are considerable and very unpleasant in a majority of cases.
They are better than dying of course - death from metastized prostate cancer is very painful and unpleasant. But the problem is, if your cancer is discovered by routine PSA screeing, you don't then know whether what has been discovered is a cancer that you will live with until 90 without noticing, or if its one which if not treated will kill you in a few years. Almost all men die with prostate cancer. Few die of it.
This gives rise to the problem about screening. It could be that the effects of screening will simply be to treat more people who would be better off untreated. So the discovery of a genetic marker is potentially a great step forward. If it can pick people to screen who are really at risk of a galloping form, it will lead to more treatment of those who would benefit, and less of those who don't really need it.
For what it is worth, I had to research this question for someone a few years ago. I came to the conclusion that surgery and radiation and cryo are all dubious in terms of efficacy and very poor in terms of side effects - impotence, incontinence, in the case of radiation, collateral damage to other tissue. My own conclusion was that conformal radiation is the best of the physical measures, but probably the best overall is intermittent hormone ablation.
The cancer grows in the presence of testosterone. If this is blocked, either by the administration of testosterone blocking hormones, or by physical castration, the cancer will cease to grow and will shrink. PSA will fall. Unfortunately after a while, the cancer becomes hormone refractory - it learns to grow in the absence of hormone. This is why hormonal treatments are only temporary. However, if you then turn on testosterone again, the hormone supposedly will be unable to handle it, and will shrink again.
This is what I would do if afflicted. But I know of no studies showing this works, and I've never met anyone who has undergone it. Apparently what you do is total hormone blockade with drugs for about a year or 15 months, then stop and let testosterone production resume. As soon as PSA rises again, go back on the drugs. Its probably very risky. But the alternatives are not very appetizing either.
This is not like appendicitis. Its one of those things where no alternative is good, and what to do depends on your judgment of risks and rewards. Very tough. My friend by the way had a biopsy. He was free of cancer. But the act of taking the biopsy under general anaesthetic was not risk free, and produced a total urinary blockage. He was then permanently catheterized, which gradually took a toll on him because of repeated infections, and he ended up dying with MRSA of a failing heart. Whether to find out for sure if you have it is not a simple decision.
All you have to do to be able to buy them separately is be alive in the OECD. Are there any countries where you CANNOT buy a retail copy of OSX without buying a Mac? If necessary by having it shipped from some other country? Don't think so. It gets weirder and weirder. Now we have people arguing that you have no right to compel Apple to do something it is doing already of its own free will. Getting real indignant about the idea they might be forced to do it, too.
Wake up. Go over to Amazon. Buy a retail copy if you like.
Now the issue is, can they tell you what to do with it.
Be careful what you wish for on this step. Do you want to allow MS to argue that its retail copy of Windows is not a sale but a license and cannot lawfully be installed on Parallels? Do you want MS to be able to argue that Office can only lawfully be installed on Windows?
What about Citrix porting Windows apps to iPhone bypassing the App store? Do you think they should be able to do that? OK, what do you make of Office running under Wine on a Mac, then? Should this be allowed under the terms of the so called Office license?
The problem is post sale restraints on use. They are not enforceable, and the effort to stop Psystar or anyone else is doomed. Unless they can be bullied or bought off. On the legal merits it will not fly.
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.
I've not written a book but I support two authors. #1 has always written in a word processor, so I have left him alone to do that. He is on OO on Linux. He does not do any elaborate formatting on account of not knowing how. The only constraints I imposed were, one document per chapter, no one document over 100 pages - split it into two or more files, no inserted graphics - graphics as standalone files with labels and tags where they are to go. It has worked fine, the publishers accept his stuff with no problems, and while OO has crashed once or twice, he has never lost any data. This is in years, it goes back to OO V1. Charts and illustrations are done in OO also. When he has to give presentations, he does them in Impress and then exports them as pdf, and all venues have been able to show them perfectly with no problems. He tries to get collaborative submissions to shared author publications submitted in rtf, because of problems with heavily formatted different versions of Word.
#2 was writing in OO, and it was fine for short documents, but on his first book got heavily into formatting, to the point where on a tight deadline he was spending all his time trying to get the format to look right, and his ability to do that was very limited (like, using spaces instead of tabs!). It was getting very upsetting. I took a deep breath and moved him to Lyx one weekend - took all the writing so far off into plain text, and then cut and pasted it back in myself and reformatted it so all the headers and subsections worked OK. After an afternoon showing him how to navigate and do the different headers and so on, he never looked back and would never use anything else. It felt very brave at the time, but it worked brilliantly. You can export from Lyx into text of course, and the publisher is fine with that, and when he has to supply print ready copy, as sometimes happens, he can just deliver a pdf.
What I learned is, the tool is not so critical as long as (1) the user can manage it (2) he does not try to do page layout, but leaves that to the publisher. Also that some form of outliner (what #2 is using Lyx for) is very powerful once people get it.
My belief, but its the belief of an outsider, is that what they really should be using is a multiple view tabbed text editor like Kate, on a 22 inch or higher screen. I think that with that, they'd be much better able to control content, double views into the document would make it easy to do cross references and comparisons of material, there would be just about no formatting other than what they put into a header - like 'Chapter 1: xxxxxx'. Subsections can be done similarly. Search and replace is very powerful. When I've mentioned it, they are basically sympathetic, when shown, they see how it could help. But the issue is, no-one really wants to learn a new way of working if the old one works to a reasonable extent.
You are partly right, but surely the issue is, they have no right to restrict what A RETAIL COPY OF OSX is installed on. They do not have to sell retail copies, but having sold them they cannot restrict what you then do with them. The anti trust suit was not central to the issue at all. It was worth trying. But the central issue is and has always been whether a seller of goods and services can
(a) turn a sale into a license not by changing any of the aspects of the product or the supply of it, but simply by imposing conditions on purchase.
(b) impose post sales restraints on use.
Take for instance the case of a drill manufacturer. He makes two kinds of drill, which are labelled professional and diy. They are both sold in Home Depot on the same shelves and via the same checkout counter. One of them has a shrink wrapped eula in it. It says this is not a sale but a license, and by buying it you agree not to use it in way of trade. The other physically identical drill sells for double the price, and says that this too is not a sale but a license, and this you may use in way of trade.
Does anyone really believe that a lawsuit against a buyer who has used the diy drill in way of trade will actually result in enforcement? Does anyone really believe that the sale will be held to be not a sale but a license?
As usual the article and the commentaries ask and answer completely the wrong question.
The interesting question is NOT whether, if you take a Mac spec as your starting point, you can duplicate it for less elsewhere from another vendor. The answer is usually, no, not very much, and sometimes it costs more. Which tells us just about nothing about suitability of product or value for money.
The interesting question is whether, if you are looking for a computer, you can find a better value choice better suited to your needs from the Mac range or from other vendors ranges.
You almost always can. The reason is, the paucity of price points and specification points in the Mac range. This results in Macs being an overpriced or underfeatured choice for most people most of the time.
This leads to a simple conclusion. For most people, most of the time, the Mac product is going to be overpriced. For most people, the other vendor product is going to offer better value. Which is quite compatible with the proposition that for any given point in the Mac range, its hard or impossible to duplicate it for much less. This was however never the issue.
The Mac range is not the starting point for comparisons, any more than the Louis Vuitton range is. How one wishes people would stop pretending that it is.
Then I must be able to get the source, modify it like with any other open source software, make derivative products, and install it on the hardware of my choice, and sell the result to whoever I want. Right?
This may be true in one way, this is how the law may be, in one or more of the many hundreds of countries in the world.
Unfortunately what the court decision is telling you is that the law in the USA is not as you would like it to be. That is not a matter of anyone's opinion, its a decision of the court, its the way the law is. If I don't like it, or if Steve does not like it, or if you do not like it, tough. When you say, 'grow up people', do you mean the court should grow up and change its mind about what the law is? A ridiculous idea, the court is the arbiter, its not opining, its deciding. Or do you mean that people should grow up and stop wanting Apple to comply with the law? Why exactly?
You need to take your own advice: grow up, and start respecting the law of the USA as enunciated by the courts. The laws were passed by a democratically elected body, the judgments are being passed by a judiciary which has been appointed in accordance with the appropriate processes. What needs to happen is for Apple to comply, just like everyone else has to comply. Whether they or you like it or not.
They are under no obligation to make an OS that runs on any particular hardware. So they can modify OSX to do what you suggest. Dongles are legal, registration is legal, checking for particular chips is legal. The only thing they cannot do is, by conditions on sale, or by any other form of contract for that matter, restrict what you do with your purchased retail copy of OSX - provided such uses are not contrary to other laws, such as copyright. Think a 'diy' power tool. They do not have to sell through any particular channel. They don't have to make it compatible with their pro series batteries. But they cannot tell you you may not use it in way of trade. And it doesn't matter what contract they sign with you, it will not be enforceable. Because, generally, post sales restraints on use are not.
"I am the law. According to the law, no post sale restriction on what you install a retail copy of some software on, is enforceable. You want to stop people installing your software on other hardware? You could always move to a different jurisdiction.... You could lobby to get the law changed..... You could adopt technical measures..... You could stop selling reteil copies.....
"And while you're making up your mind, be quiet please."
There is a serious point here buried in the mass of rather thoughtless commentary. It is about what evidence there is for previous global or at least very large scale regional climate variation, not related to CO2.
This was the point of the Hockey Stick study. It seemed to show that there had been little natural variation in climate from about 1000 to 1975, after which temperatures seemed to have risen sharply. The Medieval Warm period vanished, and so did the Roman Warm and the Little Ice Age.
The point of this was that we now had something to explain: a historically unprecedented level of warming in the immediate past. This then made it reasonable to look for some other event which had coincided with it, which could explain it, and this is or was one of the main supporting arguments for CO2 driven warming. This warming has never happened before, what else could it be? It could not be natural variation, because there was none.
Increasingly however this account has come under attack. First the original Hockey Stick studies are increasingly discredited, though the HS itself is still used for marketing purposes. Partly it is that they seem to be very sensitive to the choice of proxy series. The statistics used appear to have been mistaken. Partly it is that the instrumental record is increasingly dubious - it has so many and such difficult to explain adjustments from anything we could regard as raw data. Partly it is that studies of the landscape, such as this one, show that large scale climate change has been more common than the HS studies suggested. It now seems likely once again that simply in the last 1500 years we have had a Roman Warm and Medieval Warm period which were of roughly the same scale and warmth as today's warming. This study suggests large scale desertification may have happened in the past from unknown causes. The argument that 'it must be CO2, there is nothing else to explain it' is becoming harder and harder to justify. The argument that the warming is going to carry on, because there is nothing we can see that would stop it, is also harder to make.
After all, when the Hockey Stick went, it was not just warmings that came back. Previous cooling from those warmings also came back with them. The Little Ice Age came back, as did the cooling after the Roman Warm period. This shows that there are natural processes which have produced cooling from some kind of cyclical warming. Why exactly will these processes, whatever they were, not produce cooling in the modern warming period? You can no longer plausibly argue that there was no cooling, because there was no warming for the planet to cool from. It really did happen several times. It may happen again. In fact, the odds must be, given the past history, that it will.
The real situation is that there have been many climate changes in the past, of the same scale as today's, which were definitely not due to CO2 whether human emitted or natural. This present warming episode may be caused by CO2, but if so, its the first ever, at least in the last couple thousand years, to have been so caused.
Studies like this are very important. They give us information about exactly what it is that we need to explain, and what explanations we can exclude. They show that we have to be a lot more certain than we have yet been that natural variation cannot explain what is happening today.
Not to mention that if you look at the satellite record for the last ten years, there is increasingly less and less of a temperature rise to explain... so maybe cooling has kicked in already... but that's another story for a different day!
"Why would tying software to a particular brand of hardware be illegal?"
It is not. Dongles do this. All kinds of technical means are perfectly lawful. What is not lawful is, imposing contractual post sale restrictions on how I can use something I have bought. They are not enforceable. It is not just that Apple cannot restrict what you run your retail copy of OSX on. It is that they cannot restrict what use you make of it period. They cannot stop you using it while standing on your head, either. Or while running Wine. Or in virtual mode. As long as you don't violate copyright, they cannot tell you how to use it. This includes, but is not limited to, what hardware you install it on.
You are right and wrong. Yes, you can supply software that only works with some hardware. No, if you sell the software separately, you cannot stop people using it with whatever hardware they want, simply by contractual terms and conditions.
Apple does not have to sell OSX at retail. However, having done that, it cannot tell you what hardware to install it on.
This is true, but the restriction is going to be unenforceable, because it is a post sale restriction on use. You cannot sell a shovel, for instance, with the restriction that it cannot be used on a commercial building site. It would not stand up in court. It really does not matter what the license says, it cannot impose binding conditions that are not enforceable in the jurisdiction of sale. They would also be unenforceable if you signed a document agreeing to them before leaving the store. There are some contractual terms and conditions that are simply not lawfully enforceable in almost all OECD countries.
You need to do some research into Aricept and similar drugs in the UK NHS. This is how it works under socialized medecine.
First the drug gets approved, or not, for safety and efficacy. This means it is legal to use in the UK. But it has not yet got into the NHS. So far its only in private practice.
Then it gets approved, or not, for use in the NHS by the Orwellian named NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence, aka the State Drug Rationing Agency).
Suppose it passes that hurdle (and Aricept did not at first), then you have to persuade your local Strategic Health Authority or maybe your Primary Care Trust, or maybe both, to let you actually have it. Whether you get it will depend among other things on the then state of their budget, where you live, what their policy is, whether they like you. Who knows, whether you are obese or a smoker perhaps. You have no RIGHT to any treatment whatever. You see, its free at the point of use, which is the Orwellian description of saying that you have paid for it out of taxes and have no right to any particular treatment for any particular condition.
They are operating a defined contribution, discretionary benefit, compulsory membership, HMO. Its called a lot of other fancy names, but this is what it is. What it does not do is treat, still less treat equally, Alzheimers patients. If it can possibly avoid it.
Universal health care is not evil, Europe does it very well. Don't however mistake what goes on in the UK for universal health care. Its socialized medecine. They are different.
No, its not an illegal tying arrangement. It is an illegal post sales restriction on use, and that is different. Basic point is still valid, whichever, the clause is not going to be enforceable in court. Not in the US or EC.
You've got the problem exactly the wrong way round. No-one is making any demands on Apple. It is not that the product does not work the way people want. On the contrary, it does work just fine, and they do not want Apple to do anything. No-one is asking Apple to do anything but what they are doing now, at least in the way of developing and producing software and systems.
What they want is for Apple to stop trying to tell people what to do with their products once they have bought them. Yes, people want to get their way on this. But the reason is that its a fundamental point of principle. You get to the heart of this in a couple of your points.
In one you say "They deliberately tried to sell a product created and sold by another company in a way they didn't want it to be done". Yes, that is what they did. This is something they have a perfect right to do, just as you have the right to buy Jeyes fluid in the UK, which is meant to be used as a cleaning agent, and use it as a garden treatment agent against mould and some insects. They cannot stop you doing this if you feel like it. You compare it to Ford, and you also say "Just because its in a box, on a shelf, and you can buy it, doesn't give you the right to decide that you can change what its for".
Well it does because that is what the law says you have a right to do. Its exactly the opposite direction from the way you're looking at it. It is not that Apple has a perfect right to tell you how to use its products, and if you do not like it, don't buy them. The real situation is that once you have bought an Apple product, Apple has no right to tell you how to use it, and if Apple doesn't like it, it should stop selling the products
Now, take the case of Ford. Ford does not have the right to forbid you to use one of its cars in way of trade. Nor does it have the right to make you agree to only use Genuine Ford Parts in it. There is a very important public policy reason why you cannot control the use people make of your products after you've sold them. It is because it permits anti competitive tactics, like, tied sales of parts. Like, an artificially priced 'professional' product. Like, linked sales (which are also forbidden in most jurisdictions).
It is exactly the same problem that MS has. It has a clause in the Office license that this can only be run on Windows. It has never to my knowledge been tested. But if it were, if you were accused of running your retail copy of Office on Wine for Mac or Linux, I do not believe it would hold up. You have bought the copy at retail, and you can run it on whatever you want, as long as you respect copyright.
This is also not about Eulas. This is about the ability of a company to, as a condition of sale, oblige customers to enter into an agreement which is contrary to the law of the land. That is, if the agreement is valid, it will allow them to impose restrictions which consumer protection and competition law says cannot be imposed.
There is no difference between Apple telling you what system you may install your purchased copy of OSX on, and Apple telling you what you may use your computer for. There is no difference between these restrictions, and MS trying to tie Windows to some particular hardware manufacturers. There is no difference between these restrictions, and a company wrapping its consumer drill in a shrink wrapped pack which, when you open it, you discover prevents you from using it on any other property than one you own or rent. This you see is the consumer, not the trade, version. That is why the trade version costs more. They're the same drill. Its just that the license is different.
Psystar may have done other things wrong. But on this one, they are exactly in the right. They have bought, as agents of their customers, retail software packs which they have then installed for them in ways that the original manufacturer positively did not want. They had every right to do this. Just as you have a right to use any sort of aftermarket parts you want in your Ford. Ford will not like it either.
Yes, it is true that they are deliberately circumventing software restrictions on what can be installed on what. And also that they are doing it for profit. But I doubt there's anything unlawful about that. When you try to restrain what people install your software on (or pay others to install on), you are trying to tell them what to do with your software after you have sold them a copy.
The argument will then be made, its not a sale but a license. I don't think this will hold up. You go into a store, and you buy two CDs. One has a copy of Idomeneo on it, the other a copy of OSX. Both are boxed. Both, your financial obligations to store and manufacturer are at an end the moment payment is taken. This is a sale.
This is why it is a freedom issue. It concerns your freedom to use your purchased goods as you please. After the sale, the vendor has nothing to say about it. I'd go further. Apple has no more right to tell you what you may or may not install your copy on, than anyone else has. Like, MS has just as much right to tell you what to do with it (ie none) as Apple.
If the EULA clause forbidding incorrect uses were to be upheld, then we would see all kinds of clauses about use proliferate. We would, for instance, see conditions of sale which prohibited the use of DIY tools in way of trade. It may seem absurd, but it would be the same principle. MS could lawfully prohibit the use of Wine to run Office. You could undertake, whenever you bought a car, by condition of sale, to only use genuine GM parts for the rest of that car's life.
I agree with you, that Apple likely does not care about hackers but about companies. However in law, is there really a difference? I do it, I pay someone to do it, what's the difference, if the prohibition is not valid in the first place. There is nothing to stop anyone buying retail copies of anything else and then selling them. Well, there is one exception in some states: liquor. But it is made an exception and its a condition of a liquor license which is ongoing, and there are public policy reasons for it. Generally there is nothing to stop me buying goods at retail, packaging them with other goods, and then selling the ensemble, perhaps including some service.
I can, for example, buy a copy of Windows at retail, and then sell it with a computer. MS offers OEM discounts, but there is nothing legal to stop me doing the first, if I could find customers.
So where we will end up on this, if Apple wins this one, is that someone will just start shipping machines preloaded not with OSX, but with a preinstalled boot script which will boot the machine up and then use an off the shelf copy of OSX. This is something that will be quick, easy and cheap, and it will be sold with the slogan 'Ready for you to install your copy of Mac OSX'. Maybe you'll then be given a link to Amazon to buy OSX. Or maybe they will pass the order on for you if you check a box.
If people really want your OS, but they really do not want to buy your hardware with it, and if the process of installing your OS on different hardware is more or less automatable, and if you sell your OS at retail without your hardware, you have, long term, a broken business model. It is not going to be enforceable. The best you can do is adapt and make it as least damaging to your reputation as possible. Turning yourself into the RIAA is not going to either stop it or help your reputation and image. Just about the only thing to do is go with it.
The thing that Apple has to fear more than anything else is that this suit ends up firmly establishing it in the public's mind as controlling, authoritarian, tied up in knots with DRM and so on. Once the image has gone, its dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is obvious if you've ever been in a Fortune 500 senior management meeting making an investment decision. You have one proposal portrayed in too exhaustive detail for you to be able to see the assumptions. What you need is a few likely scenarios in little enough detail that you can debate the assumptions. Then you have the result presented in PPT slides which you have not seen before, where after the fact you have no idea why the group decided what they did. Or often, even what they decided. What you actually want is prose, which everyone has read in advance, which makes the thing crystal clear: what, why, how.
Solution: keep Excel in Accounting. Do business decision making with 5 page written papers, 1 page of financials, max 3 graphics. No overheads except the graphics. It works.
Elegy on the Death of Steve Jobs*
Farewell Steve Jobs the charismatic preacher
Whose first vocation was perhaps Guyana
That sunlit clearing where the waiting crowd
Wept as they drank and died, and he died later.
But Woz and Sculley, illness, resurrection
The cheering lost familial annual crowds
Saved him from all that. Now he has died
The Cupertino crowds that lined the streets
Through which his train with black clad mourners flowed
Could half not know they had been acolytes.
They strewed the road before him with their flowers
Something of loveliness had left their lives
They'd not so much believed as felt a pull
Where buying was belonging, using meant
A spiritual rapture and a state of grace
Inclined without necessity. There, freedom
Seemed to be perfected in his will.
But turn turn away now, turn you now and climb.
Off board the pastel roaring bird your ashes
Drift as a grey cloud into the waves
They cannot hear your funeral elegies
That blend of Zen, Far Eastern and New Age
That spiritual pride is all forgotten now
And whether it was cult, religion, commerce
Will not long trouble now the primeval ooze
Or settling dust of what was once a man.
*No, he is not dead. It's a poem.
published a while back on http://www.oftwominds.com/
Its not every few months. The time between recurrences is said to be in years. Its certainly true that total cessation of testosterone must be unpleasant. Though probably bearable if you know its only for a year or so. It has its own dangers also, notably osteoporosis. However, its not that its good. Its whether it may be the best of the alternatives.
This is an issue for every man over 65 or so. Its an issue for a some men between 50 and 65, and for very few under 50. But if you have a father, its going to be an issue for him.
The problem is that you can diagnose the condition fairly well. You can do PSA tests, particularly free PSA, and you can take biopsies. The thing you can't do is predict very well from these tests how vigorous the cancer is. Now, this might not matter if the treatments were fairly benign, and if they were highly sucessful. But they are not. The side effects of all physical treatments, including radiation, are considerable and very unpleasant in a majority of cases.
They are better than dying of course - death from metastized prostate cancer is very painful and unpleasant. But the problem is, if your cancer is discovered by routine PSA screeing, you don't then know whether what has been discovered is a cancer that you will live with until 90 without noticing, or if its one which if not treated will kill you in a few years. Almost all men die with prostate cancer. Few die of it.
This gives rise to the problem about screening. It could be that the effects of screening will simply be to treat more people who would be better off untreated. So the discovery of a genetic marker is potentially a great step forward. If it can pick people to screen who are really at risk of a galloping form, it will lead to more treatment of those who would benefit, and less of those who don't really need it.
For what it is worth, I had to research this question for someone a few years ago. I came to the conclusion that surgery and radiation and cryo are all dubious in terms of efficacy and very poor in terms of side effects - impotence, incontinence, in the case of radiation, collateral damage to other tissue. My own conclusion was that conformal radiation is the best of the physical measures, but probably the best overall is intermittent hormone ablation.
The cancer grows in the presence of testosterone. If this is blocked, either by the administration of testosterone blocking hormones, or by physical castration, the cancer will cease to grow and will shrink. PSA will fall. Unfortunately after a while, the cancer becomes hormone refractory - it learns to grow in the absence of hormone. This is why hormonal treatments are only temporary. However, if you then turn on testosterone again, the hormone supposedly will be unable to handle it, and will shrink again.
This is what I would do if afflicted. But I know of no studies showing this works, and I've never met anyone who has undergone it. Apparently what you do is total hormone blockade with drugs for about a year or 15 months, then stop and let testosterone production resume. As soon as PSA rises again, go back on the drugs. Its probably very risky. But the alternatives are not very appetizing either.
This is not like appendicitis. Its one of those things where no alternative is good, and what to do depends on your judgment of risks and rewards. Very tough. My friend by the way had a biopsy. He was free of cancer. But the act of taking the biopsy under general anaesthetic was not risk free, and produced a total urinary blockage. He was then permanently catheterized, which gradually took a toll on him because of repeated infections, and he ended up dying with MRSA of a failing heart. Whether to find out for sure if you have it is not a simple decision.
All you have to do to be able to buy them separately is be alive in the OECD. Are there any countries where you CANNOT buy a retail copy of OSX without buying a Mac? If necessary by having it shipped from some other country? Don't think so. It gets weirder and weirder. Now we have people arguing that you have no right to compel Apple to do something it is doing already of its own free will. Getting real indignant about the idea they might be forced to do it, too.
Wake up. Go over to Amazon. Buy a retail copy if you like.
Now the issue is, can they tell you what to do with it.
Be careful what you wish for on this step. Do you want to allow MS to argue that its retail copy of Windows is not a sale but a license and cannot lawfully be installed on Parallels? Do you want MS to be able to argue that Office can only lawfully be installed on Windows?
What about Citrix porting Windows apps to iPhone bypassing the App store? Do you think they should be able to do that? OK, what do you make of Office running under Wine on a Mac, then? Should this be allowed under the terms of the so called Office license?
The problem is post sale restraints on use. They are not enforceable, and the effort to stop Psystar or anyone else is doomed. Unless they can be bullied or bought off. On the legal merits it will not fly.
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.
I've not written a book but I support two authors. #1 has always written in a word processor, so I have left him alone to do that. He is on OO on Linux. He does not do any elaborate formatting on account of not knowing how. The only constraints I imposed were, one document per chapter, no one document over 100 pages - split it into two or more files, no inserted graphics - graphics as standalone files with labels and tags where they are to go. It has worked fine, the publishers accept his stuff with no problems, and while OO has crashed once or twice, he has never lost any data. This is in years, it goes back to OO V1. Charts and illustrations are done in OO also. When he has to give presentations, he does them in Impress and then exports them as pdf, and all venues have been able to show them perfectly with no problems. He tries to get collaborative submissions to shared author publications submitted in rtf, because of problems with heavily formatted different versions of Word.
#2 was writing in OO, and it was fine for short documents, but on his first book got heavily into formatting, to the point where on a tight deadline he was spending all his time trying to get the format to look right, and his ability to do that was very limited (like, using spaces instead of tabs!). It was getting very upsetting. I took a deep breath and moved him to Lyx one weekend - took all the writing so far off into plain text, and then cut and pasted it back in myself and reformatted it so all the headers and subsections worked OK. After an afternoon showing him how to navigate and do the different headers and so on, he never looked back and would never use anything else. It felt very brave at the time, but it worked brilliantly. You can export from Lyx into text of course, and the publisher is fine with that, and when he has to supply print ready copy, as sometimes happens, he can just deliver a pdf.
What I learned is, the tool is not so critical as long as (1) the user can manage it (2) he does not try to do page layout, but leaves that to the publisher. Also that some form of outliner (what #2 is using Lyx for) is very powerful once people get it.
My belief, but its the belief of an outsider, is that what they really should be using is a multiple view tabbed text editor like Kate, on a 22 inch or higher screen. I think that with that, they'd be much better able to control content, double views into the document would make it easy to do cross references and comparisons of material, there would be just about no formatting other than what they put into a header - like 'Chapter 1: xxxxxx'. Subsections can be done similarly. Search and replace is very powerful. When I've mentioned it, they are basically sympathetic, when shown, they see how it could help. But the issue is, no-one really wants to learn a new way of working if the old one works to a reasonable extent.
You are partly right, but surely the issue is, they have no right to restrict what A RETAIL COPY OF OSX is installed on. They do not have to sell retail copies, but having sold them they cannot restrict what you then do with them. The anti trust suit was not central to the issue at all. It was worth trying. But the central issue is and has always been whether a seller of goods and services can
(a) turn a sale into a license not by changing any of the aspects of the product or the supply of it, but simply by imposing conditions on purchase.
(b) impose post sales restraints on use.
Take for instance the case of a drill manufacturer. He makes two kinds of drill, which are labelled professional and diy. They are both sold in Home Depot on the same shelves and via the same checkout counter. One of them has a shrink wrapped eula in it. It says this is not a sale but a license, and by buying it you agree not to use it in way of trade. The other physically identical drill sells for double the price, and says that this too is not a sale but a license, and this you may use in way of trade.
Does anyone really believe that a lawsuit against a buyer who has used the diy drill in way of trade will actually result in enforcement? Does anyone really believe that the sale will be held to be not a sale but a license?
The law is not an ass.
No, this is quite wrong. Debian Lenny with Fluxbox and WDM is the answer.
As usual the article and the commentaries ask and answer completely the wrong question.
The interesting question is NOT whether, if you take a Mac spec as your starting point, you can duplicate it for less elsewhere from another vendor. The answer is usually, no, not very much, and sometimes it costs more. Which tells us just about nothing about suitability of product or value for money.
The interesting question is whether, if you are looking for a computer, you can find a better value choice better suited to your needs from the Mac range or from other vendors ranges.
You almost always can. The reason is, the paucity of price points and specification points in the Mac range. This results in Macs being an overpriced or underfeatured choice for most people most of the time.
This leads to a simple conclusion. For most people, most of the time, the Mac product is going to be overpriced. For most people, the other vendor product is going to offer better value. Which is quite compatible with the proposition that for any given point in the Mac range, its hard or impossible to duplicate it for much less. This was however never the issue.
The Mac range is not the starting point for comparisons, any more than the Louis Vuitton range is. How one wishes people would stop pretending that it is.
But, do their top level chassis crack? Is it a known issue with them too?
Then I must be able to get the source, modify it like with any other open source software, make derivative products, and install it on the hardware of my choice, and sell the result to whoever I want. Right?
This may be true in one way, this is how the law may be, in one or more of the many hundreds of countries in the world.
Unfortunately what the court decision is telling you is that the law in the USA is not as you would like it to be. That is not a matter of anyone's opinion, its a decision of the court, its the way the law is. If I don't like it, or if Steve does not like it, or if you do not like it, tough. When you say, 'grow up people', do you mean the court should grow up and change its mind about what the law is? A ridiculous idea, the court is the arbiter, its not opining, its deciding. Or do you mean that people should grow up and stop wanting Apple to comply with the law? Why exactly?
You need to take your own advice: grow up, and start respecting the law of the USA as enunciated by the courts. The laws were passed by a democratically elected body, the judgments are being passed by a judiciary which has been appointed in accordance with the appropriate processes. What needs to happen is for Apple to comply, just like everyone else has to comply. Whether they or you like it or not.
They are under no obligation to make an OS that runs on any particular hardware. So they can modify OSX to do what you suggest. Dongles are legal, registration is legal, checking for particular chips is legal. The only thing they cannot do is, by conditions on sale, or by any other form of contract for that matter, restrict what you do with your purchased retail copy of OSX - provided such uses are not contrary to other laws, such as copyright. Think a 'diy' power tool. They do not have to sell through any particular channel. They don't have to make it compatible with their pro series batteries. But they cannot tell you you may not use it in way of trade. And it doesn't matter what contract they sign with you, it will not be enforceable. Because, generally, post sales restraints on use are not.
You fail to understand.
"Who are you?"
"I am the law. According to the law, no post sale restriction on what you install a retail copy of some software on, is enforceable. You want to stop people installing your software on other hardware? You could always move to a different jurisdiction.... You could lobby to get the law changed..... You could adopt technical measures..... You could stop selling reteil copies.....
"And while you're making up your mind, be quiet please."
There is a serious point here buried in the mass of rather thoughtless commentary. It is about what evidence there is for previous global or at least very large scale regional climate variation, not related to CO2.
This was the point of the Hockey Stick study. It seemed to show that there had been little natural variation in climate from about 1000 to 1975, after which temperatures seemed to have risen sharply. The Medieval Warm period vanished, and so did the Roman Warm and the Little Ice Age.
The point of this was that we now had something to explain: a historically unprecedented level of warming in the immediate past. This then made it reasonable to look for some other event which had coincided with it, which could explain it, and this is or was one of the main supporting arguments for CO2 driven warming. This warming has never happened before, what else could it be? It could not be natural variation, because there was none.
Increasingly however this account has come under attack. First the original Hockey Stick studies are increasingly discredited, though the HS itself is still used for marketing purposes. Partly it is that they seem to be very sensitive to the choice of proxy series. The statistics used appear to have been mistaken. Partly it is that the instrumental record is increasingly dubious - it has so many and such difficult to explain adjustments from anything we could regard as raw data. Partly it is that studies of the landscape, such as this one, show that large scale climate change has been more common than the HS studies suggested. It now seems likely once again that simply in the last 1500 years we have had a Roman Warm and Medieval Warm period which were of roughly the same scale and warmth as today's warming. This study suggests large scale desertification may have happened in the past from unknown causes. The argument that 'it must be CO2, there is nothing else to explain it' is becoming harder and harder to justify. The argument that the warming is going to carry on, because there is nothing we can see that would stop it, is also harder to make.
After all, when the Hockey Stick went, it was not just warmings that came back. Previous cooling from those warmings also came back with them. The Little Ice Age came back, as did the cooling after the Roman Warm period. This shows that there are natural processes which have produced cooling from some kind of cyclical warming. Why exactly will these processes, whatever they were, not produce cooling in the modern warming period? You can no longer plausibly argue that there was no cooling, because there was no warming for the planet to cool from. It really did happen several times. It may happen again. In fact, the odds must be, given the past history, that it will.
The real situation is that there have been many climate changes in the past, of the same scale as today's, which were definitely not due to CO2 whether human emitted or natural. This present warming episode may be caused by CO2, but if so, its the first ever, at least in the last couple thousand years, to have been so caused.
Studies like this are very important. They give us information about exactly what it is that we need to explain, and what explanations we can exclude. They show that we have to be a lot more certain than we have yet been that natural variation cannot explain what is happening today.
Not to mention that if you look at the satellite record for the last ten years, there is increasingly less and less of a temperature rise to explain... so maybe cooling has kicked in already... but that's another story for a different day!
"Why would tying software to a particular brand of hardware be illegal?" It is not. Dongles do this. All kinds of technical means are perfectly lawful. What is not lawful is, imposing contractual post sale restrictions on how I can use something I have bought. They are not enforceable. It is not just that Apple cannot restrict what you run your retail copy of OSX on. It is that they cannot restrict what use you make of it period. They cannot stop you using it while standing on your head, either. Or while running Wine. Or in virtual mode. As long as you don't violate copyright, they cannot tell you how to use it. This includes, but is not limited to, what hardware you install it on.
You are right and wrong. Yes, you can supply software that only works with some hardware. No, if you sell the software separately, you cannot stop people using it with whatever hardware they want, simply by contractual terms and conditions. Apple does not have to sell OSX at retail. However, having done that, it cannot tell you what hardware to install it on.
This is true, but the restriction is going to be unenforceable, because it is a post sale restriction on use. You cannot sell a shovel, for instance, with the restriction that it cannot be used on a commercial building site. It would not stand up in court. It really does not matter what the license says, it cannot impose binding conditions that are not enforceable in the jurisdiction of sale. They would also be unenforceable if you signed a document agreeing to them before leaving the store. There are some contractual terms and conditions that are simply not lawfully enforceable in almost all OECD countries.
You need to do some research into Aricept and similar drugs in the UK NHS. This is how it works under socialized medecine.
First the drug gets approved, or not, for safety and efficacy. This means it is legal to use in the UK. But it has not yet got into the NHS. So far its only in private practice.
Then it gets approved, or not, for use in the NHS by the Orwellian named NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence, aka the State Drug Rationing Agency).
Suppose it passes that hurdle (and Aricept did not at first), then you have to persuade your local Strategic Health Authority or maybe your Primary Care Trust, or maybe both, to let you actually have it. Whether you get it will depend among other things on the then state of their budget, where you live, what their policy is, whether they like you. Who knows, whether you are obese or a smoker perhaps. You have no RIGHT to any treatment whatever. You see, its free at the point of use, which is the Orwellian description of saying that you have paid for it out of taxes and have no right to any particular treatment for any particular condition.
They are operating a defined contribution, discretionary benefit, compulsory membership, HMO. Its called a lot of other fancy names, but this is what it is. What it does not do is treat, still less treat equally, Alzheimers patients. If it can possibly avoid it.
Universal health care is not evil, Europe does it very well. Don't however mistake what goes on in the UK for universal health care. Its socialized medecine. They are different.
Get him Revolution Media or PythonCard. He'll move on in his own time from either.
"They have a reasonably strong argument in their favor of preventing the widespread publishing of stupid wrong information"
My right to publish stupid wrong information is called free speech. Others' right to prevent me is called censorship.
No, its not an illegal tying arrangement. It is an illegal post sales restriction on use, and that is different. Basic point is still valid, whichever, the clause is not going to be enforceable in court. Not in the US or EC.
What they want is for Apple to stop trying to tell people what to do with their products once they have bought them. Yes, people want to get their way on this. But the reason is that its a fundamental point of principle. You get to the heart of this in a couple of your points.
In one you say "They deliberately tried to sell a product created and sold by another company in a way they didn't want it to be done". Yes, that is what they did. This is something they have a perfect right to do, just as you have the right to buy Jeyes fluid in the UK, which is meant to be used as a cleaning agent, and use it as a garden treatment agent against mould and some insects. They cannot stop you doing this if you feel like it. You compare it to Ford, and you also say "Just because its in a box, on a shelf, and you can buy it, doesn't give you the right to decide that you can change what its for".
Well it does because that is what the law says you have a right to do. Its exactly the opposite direction from the way you're looking at it. It is not that Apple has a perfect right to tell you how to use its products, and if you do not like it, don't buy them. The real situation is that once you have bought an Apple product, Apple has no right to tell you how to use it, and if Apple doesn't like it, it should stop selling the products
Now, take the case of Ford. Ford does not have the right to forbid you to use one of its cars in way of trade. Nor does it have the right to make you agree to only use Genuine Ford Parts in it. There is a very important public policy reason why you cannot control the use people make of your products after you've sold them. It is because it permits anti competitive tactics, like, tied sales of parts. Like, an artificially priced 'professional' product. Like, linked sales (which are also forbidden in most jurisdictions).
It is exactly the same problem that MS has. It has a clause in the Office license that this can only be run on Windows. It has never to my knowledge been tested. But if it were, if you were accused of running your retail copy of Office on Wine for Mac or Linux, I do not believe it would hold up. You have bought the copy at retail, and you can run it on whatever you want, as long as you respect copyright.
This is also not about Eulas. This is about the ability of a company to, as a condition of sale, oblige customers to enter into an agreement which is contrary to the law of the land. That is, if the agreement is valid, it will allow them to impose restrictions which consumer protection and competition law says cannot be imposed.
There is no difference between Apple telling you what system you may install your purchased copy of OSX on, and Apple telling you what you may use your computer for. There is no difference between these restrictions, and MS trying to tie Windows to some particular hardware manufacturers. There is no difference between these restrictions, and a company wrapping its consumer drill in a shrink wrapped pack which, when you open it, you discover prevents you from using it on any other property than one you own or rent. This you see is the consumer, not the trade, version. That is why the trade version costs more. They're the same drill. Its just that the license is different.
Psystar may have done other things wrong. But on this one, they are exactly in the right. They have bought, as agents of their customers, retail software packs which they have then installed for them in ways that the original manufacturer positively did not want. They had every right to do this. Just as you have a right to use any sort of aftermarket parts you want in your Ford. Ford will not like it either.
But they have had to get used to it.
Yes, it is true that they are deliberately circumventing software restrictions on what can be installed on what. And also that they are doing it for profit. But I doubt there's anything unlawful about that. When you try to restrain what people install your software on (or pay others to install on), you are trying to tell them what to do with your software after you have sold them a copy.
The argument will then be made, its not a sale but a license. I don't think this will hold up. You go into a store, and you buy two CDs. One has a copy of Idomeneo on it, the other a copy of OSX. Both are boxed. Both, your financial obligations to store and manufacturer are at an end the moment payment is taken. This is a sale.
This is why it is a freedom issue. It concerns your freedom to use your purchased goods as you please. After the sale, the vendor has nothing to say about it. I'd go further. Apple has no more right to tell you what you may or may not install your copy on, than anyone else has. Like, MS has just as much right to tell you what to do with it (ie none) as Apple.
If the EULA clause forbidding incorrect uses were to be upheld, then we would see all kinds of clauses about use proliferate. We would, for instance, see conditions of sale which prohibited the use of DIY tools in way of trade. It may seem absurd, but it would be the same principle. MS could lawfully prohibit the use of Wine to run Office. You could undertake, whenever you bought a car, by condition of sale, to only use genuine GM parts for the rest of that car's life.
I agree with you, that Apple likely does not care about hackers but about companies. However in law, is there really a difference? I do it, I pay someone to do it, what's the difference, if the prohibition is not valid in the first place. There is nothing to stop anyone buying retail copies of anything else and then selling them. Well, there is one exception in some states: liquor. But it is made an exception and its a condition of a liquor license which is ongoing, and there are public policy reasons for it. Generally there is nothing to stop me buying goods at retail, packaging them with other goods, and then selling the ensemble, perhaps including some service.
I can, for example, buy a copy of Windows at retail, and then sell it with a computer. MS offers OEM discounts, but there is nothing legal to stop me doing the first, if I could find customers.
So where we will end up on this, if Apple wins this one, is that someone will just start shipping machines preloaded not with OSX, but with a preinstalled boot script which will boot the machine up and then use an off the shelf copy of OSX. This is something that will be quick, easy and cheap, and it will be sold with the slogan 'Ready for you to install your copy of Mac OSX'. Maybe you'll then be given a link to Amazon to buy OSX. Or maybe they will pass the order on for you if you check a box.
If people really want your OS, but they really do not want to buy your hardware with it, and if the process of installing your OS on different hardware is more or less automatable, and if you sell your OS at retail without your hardware, you have, long term, a broken business model. It is not going to be enforceable. The best you can do is adapt and make it as least damaging to your reputation as possible. Turning yourself into the RIAA is not going to either stop it or help your reputation and image. Just about the only thing to do is go with it.
The thing that Apple has to fear more than anything else is that this suit ends up firmly establishing it in the public's mind as controlling, authoritarian, tied up in knots with DRM and so on. Once the image has gone, its dead.