What the Psystar site says is that the updates are downloaded from Apple. By the user. Using a scripted installer supplied by Psystar. Its not at all clear that there is anything unlawful in that. Its probably not even against the license terms. Does it say anyplace in the license that when updating your system, and downloading the updates from Apple, you are forbidden to make use of any third party scripts? If it did, do you really think this would be enforceable?
Its not the same thing, but consider the case of slipstreaming updates into your XP installation disk. Is that unlawful? There are real similarities. This is a lot more complicated than you may think.
It does not matter whether you can duplicate a Mac for less. What matters is, after you have settled on a spec you want, or found a Dell or HP you want, can you duplicate that for the same price from the Apple product line?
95% of the time you can't. This is what makes Apple a rip-off.
It would only matter that you could not duplicate a Mac cheaper, if the Mac spec were the starting point for shopping. It very rarely is.
Yes, if Apple wins. What however if Apple does not win? Don't be so sure. They thought long and hard before suing and may regret it deeply before this is all over.
There are all kinds of groups in the West that have no words for things. Like one subculture has no words to express the concept of the temperature of the planet being static, decreasing or even fluctuating randomly. They simply cannot give voice to those concepts. Some anthropologists think this is why they are always saying it is warming, regardless of what the temperatures are actually doing. It is not that they think it is warming in the same way that we would if we said it, its just that they are trying to make conversation about the planet, and this is all that comes out.
This missing vocabulary thing is much more common than people usually realize. Apparently something similar has happened at a lot of financial institutions in the US. They had until recently no concept of down. They always said they were taking the elevator up. When prices fell out of bed, they said they had risen. The thing that really got them was when defaults started to rise. Then they needed words to say they had in fact, well, what had they really done? We knew they could not have risen, so there must have been something else that they could have done. What could that have been?
I hear they are all frantically looking up in thesauruses and dictionaries now, trying to find out how to describe the baffling phenomena they see around them. Must be tough.
People are not addressing the real argument here. Of course no-one wants to live differently. Of course they will resist it, spend more on transport, and so on. Of course they do not want to live near where they work. But its not about wanting, its about how much you pay for what you want.
What will happen in the real world as gas rises to $20+ a gallon, you are too far from work and shops to use an electric car, there's no mass transit because locations are so dispersed, and your employer cannot pay you any more because sales are down? You simply cannot drive 20k miles per year any more, because you don't make enough money to buy the gas.
We will get there relatively gradually, it will not happen next week. But it will come, because this is peak oil and China and India are competing for it too.
People are not going to be able to consume as much gas as they do today, for the simple reason, it will take half or more of their after tax income to do it. How they feel about it is immaterial.
And you say it cannot happen? In the UK right now diesel costs about $10 an imperial gallon. People are stopping driving, they are cycling to the store, and they are turning off their heating boilers and buying coal stoves. And this is just the start.
If you think this is fantasy, you need, to be convincing, to state where the new oil reserves are being found, or what the alternative source of fuel for cars is. It needs to get here soon, like in two three years.
I continue to believe the suburban gasoline driven car based lifestyle is toast, and that its changing will involve real hardship. Yes, electric cars will come. In many parts of the world so will electric bikes! But they will not populate the New Jersey Turnpike or the Long Island Expressway like the rush hour does today, driving the same distances, to and from the same neighborhoods. That is pure fantasy.
As usual, people assume that the problem is the fuel. Its not. Its the lifestyle. People are right to say that nothing can replace gasoline for the lifestyle we currently live. That is why the lifestyle is going to change, because there is not going to be affordable gasoline enough to live like that, and there are going to be no substitutes.
Folks, the 20th century is over. It was great while it lasted, suburbs, drive ins, shopping malls, long distance commutes. But its over. What is going to replace it will not be different fuels, electric cars, whatever. What will replace it is commuting by mass transit, living closer to where you work, moving into high density cities, walking to shops. Biking to work in some places. It will be a lot like Europe in the fifties. The suburbs will vanish.
Difference is, parking tickets are not covered by the EC Human Rights convention. This is about access to information, so it is. This is why it will not fly, treating it like parking tickets.
The issue is standards of proof. To be caught doing something illegal on the net three times may seem to justify disconnection. However, simply to be accused of it cannot. The fundamental problem here is economic. The rights owners cannot justify prosecution, because that demands a standard of proof of misconduct which is very expensive. You have to get the evidence, display it, allow it to be subject it to public questioning. Witnesses have to testify to how it was obtained.
This is an attempt to bypass all that. It is far cheaper to simply disconnect on three accusations. However, the problem is going to be EC human rights legislation and the first suit for false accusation. Human rights legislation is going to be a problem because the EC Charter explicitly guarantees access to information. You are only going to be able to ban someone from Internet access with the same sort of evidentiary justification that you would need to ban them from a public library or from reading the newspapers. The first suit for false denial of access to information is, for the same reason, going to be explosive. The ISPs will be acting as a cartel, so where one, acting alone, could throw anyone off for any reason, all acting together are in effect conspiring to deny the person access to information.
One supermarket may ban someone from shopping. If all start to subscribe to a common list, there's a human rights issue.
In the end this is not going to work because you cannot get around the requirement for high standards of proof before depriving people of what the EC, with a different hat on, has defined as their fundamental human rights. Hoist with their own petard, as they say in Brussels!
Copyright stops it. Copyright is distinct from licensing. What has been ruled out here is post sale restraints on use in so called license terms. Copyright would still stop copying and the release of derivative works.
No, it was a lot worse. 5 years ago there were alternatives to IE6 to access the Web, and they ran on different operating systems, and in addition, earlier versions of IE would run on Macs. Not only that, but IE would run on hardware made by any number of companies.
Hypercard was what MS would probably have liked - that is, pages which could only be written on Windows, and accessed by Windows clients, and served from Windows servers. But it went one step further - all this, and only running on MS branded hardware! To call anything like this an antecedent of the web is ludicrous. If you really want an analogy in network terms, HC was the equivalent of Compuserve or Prodigy. Killed by the web.
Hypercard was in concept the exact opposite of the web.
It was written in a proprietary language, it was only accessible via an application that would run on just one, proprietary, operating system, and this operating system would only run on hardware from one particular manufacturer. Although it was innovative, it was doomed for this reason. It was thought of by Apple as a tool to sell hardware (like everything else they did). The essence of the web was and is that it doesn't matter who supplies the hardware or software you use, and that the material you access and even web based programs are open.
As soon as it turned out to be useless as a hardware selling tool, Apple closed it down. The episode shows that Apple's basic approach to business models and indeed to information and users has not changed in twenty years. Its as authoritarian and closed as ever. It would have been so easy to open source it, or port it to other platforms. You notice by the way a continuing, odd, hangover of this approach in Filemaker. You cannot compile your Filemaker program on a platform other than the one you're going to run it on. You can't compile a Windows executable on a Mac. What a bizarre hangover!
You notice also that Revolution is the only one of the HC successors to have really succeeded, and Revolution is quite the opposite of HC in these respects: it comes for Linux, Windows and Mac, and you can compile your programs on any platform for any platform.
Nostalgia for HC is justified in one respect: it did introduce a great many inventive users to programming, and probably many of them moved on to less kindergarten languages. This was valuable. But in all other respects, business model, lockins, closed format and so on, in all those respects we should all be profoundly grateful that the HyperCard model died. Intellectual freedom would have been the loser had it succeeded on the sale some of the nostalgics wish.
It was King Arthur and the Round Table of course, these kings, who were the lost tribe of Israel as explained by the British Israel movement, they had come to the UK by routes which we no longer know about. They were, like, the original inhabitants. They had powers now lost to us and erected the stones by thinking. They were vegan, lined up their stones with the planets and the ley lines. They were like very ecological and in harmony with the environment. Later they painted themselves purple with natural plant extracts. They were priest kings. They were real left or is it right side of the brain people unlike the Romans. Like, whatever.
Bundle it with computers bought by schools and universities, maybe. Or, offer deep educational discounts for academic institutions, regardless of OS and hardware flavor, yes, also maybe.
Bundle it just with Macs is the high road to the ghetto, yet again.
The real problem with HC was the Cupertino lockin mentality. They have always had this tension between a software group, which would, if left to its own devices and tasked with maximizing the business, sell on all platforms - third party hardware in the case of the OS, or Windows and Unix as well as Mac OS in the case of Hypercard. They've even had the same tension with hardware - if they cut the hardware group loose, they would probably sell millions of designer computers with Windows rather than OSX preinstalled.
You can see the potential realized in the case of Filemaker. When released to Windows, it turned into a real business and did not hurt the Mac at all. You can also see it in the case of iTunes. But with Hypercard, the mania for Mac-only solutions to promote the sale of Macs resulted in the destruction of what could have been a great standalone business unit. In effect, Apple forced the creation of Visual Basic, and then forced people to take it up, by denying them the product they would have bought if they Apple had just made it available. E-World was the same blinkered and doomed thinking. And in the early days of Classic, in effect they forced people who wanted computers to Windows, when they would probably rather have, many of them, had Macs. Apple could not meet the demand, and would not meet the price. But the customers had to have computers, so they bought from people who would sell to them. Who can blame them?
In a typical show of pique, they then killed HC rather than, for instance, open source it. The attitude seems to have been that if we could not make it work, and make it work on our platforms only, then no-one should have it. In case they made something of it?
Apple has done well in recent years. But nothing like as well as it could have done if it had bent its efforts to allowing the really creative groups in Apple to form business units and take their products to market and follow the trail of demand. And if it had stopped spending so much energy on stopping people buying Apple products because their requirements did not exactly fit in all respects with the Cupertino model of what they should be.
If we look at the recent results in absolute terms, it seems a great story. If we look at what could have been, its the record of a company consistently failing to realize the potential of its own creativity. Crippling it, in fact.
The essential conceptual failure is the failure to appreciate that the fact that something is impossible to run on non-Apple systems is not a benefit to the Apple user. It applies to OSX as much as to e-world as to Filemaker. Its a focus on delivering what you think is your prime quality, integration, while failing to see that your real strength is as an innovator and business segment creator.
"If they lose, they null and void all the EULA's in existence"
No they do not. They just null and void the particular clause restricting where you have to buy the hardware on which you run the software sold. In this case the OS. Every EULA clause stands or falls on its merits. This particular clause has none and is not enforceable. Others may be enforceable. The problem is not with the clause being in a EULA. The problem is with the clause itself, however agreed to. You cannot enforce contractual clauses contrary to the law of the jurisdiction. That's why they are not suing.
All purchased copies are legal and legitimate whatever they run on. No restraint on the source of your hardware is going to hold up in court, which is why Apple has not sued Psystar and never will. Nor will they sue the next one to do it. Some Eula terms are valid and enforceable, this one is not.
Yes, its not going to be wind powered at all. What is in fact going to happen is that it will be connected to the grid. It will generate enough electricity to power the town, but not in a form which is usable by the town or anyone else, because it will be too variable. So, they will draw power from the grid like everyone else, exactly as before, the same amount at the same times, and also go through the motions of selling back wind generated power which is useless to the electricity company connecting them to the grid.
If everyone did this, the only result would be that the utility company would have to raise prices. Its demand would not change, its generating capacity would not change.
This is plain wrong. You bought a copy. What restrains you from making multiple copies is not the license but copyright. Cite a couple cases. There are none.
The problem is not that you have picked a Mac, and now want to find the exact same thing but cheaper. This you cannot do usually.
The problem is, you have picked a spec of a PC based on the performance you need and the money you have, and want to find similar performance for the same price in a Mac. This also you cannot do. The reason is, the product line consists either of junk you can put in a coat pocket, which you do not particularly want to do, or small unexpandable boxes which unaccountably have screens welded to them, or large standalones which when properly equipped cost...as much as your car.
So as you stare at what's on offer, you not unreasonably conclude that by comparison to what you actually need, Macs are way too expensive. What you need is real simple, its something with the the kind of spec you can buy anyplace for under $1,000, and without another screen welded to it, when you prefer your screens separate, and anyway, you have three perfectly good ones and don't see why you should be forced to buy a fourth.
This is one of the weirdest arguments you hear on this subject. If Apple hardware is so great, why are clones a threat at all? What about all those arguments showing that every time anyone tries to duplicate a Mac, they end up spending more? Why on earth would Mac buyers move to cheap junk, if Apple hardware is such great value, and it works so well with the OS?
Or could it be that Apple hardware is not that great value, not cost effective, doesn't work with the OS any better than any other hardware, and that Mac buyers are only putting up with it so as to get the OS, and that given half a chance they would move to hardware they really want....? And this is why clones really are a threat?
1) Its illegal in the US. It is not. It may be actionable in civil law. They are different.
2) They are installing unlawful copies of OSX. There is no evidence of this. They seem to be installing copies purchased at retail, not directly from Apple on OEM terms.
3) OSX is only available as an upgrade. No it is not. They are sold at retail, and do not require a preexisting installation.
It has nothing to do with copyright. Copyright does not permit restraints on use, but on copying, which is quite different.
You have a situation in which two materially identical machines sit on a bench. They have the same mainboard, memory, opticals, disk drives, processor, network and graphics cards. The power supplies may be the same or different. The cases are different. One uses EFI, the other an EFI to bios emulator. Those are trivial differences in computer specification terms. The main difference is where you buy these components from. One set you buy assembled from Apple. The other set you buy assembled from your local computer shop.
We are asked to believe that Apple can stop you installing on these components if bought from the computer shop, but allow you to install on the same set when bought from them. No way. Produce a case to support it. You will not find one. This is cut and dried, open and shut, in terms of competition law. You can't stop people using THE IDENTICAL STUFF with your product just because they did not buy it from you. This is a hopeless one. As soon as they went to totally standard components, the argument was going to be reduced to 'but you didn't buy them from me', and it was game over.
Slashdot Mirror
What the Psystar site says is that the updates are downloaded from Apple. By the user. Using a scripted installer supplied by Psystar. Its not at all clear that there is anything unlawful in that. Its probably not even against the license terms. Does it say anyplace in the license that when updating your system, and downloading the updates from Apple, you are forbidden to make use of any third party scripts? If it did, do you really think this would be enforceable? Its not the same thing, but consider the case of slipstreaming updates into your XP installation disk. Is that unlawful? There are real similarities. This is a lot more complicated than you may think.
Common fallacious argument.
It does not matter whether you can duplicate a Mac for less. What matters is, after you have settled on a spec you want, or found a Dell or HP you want, can you duplicate that for the same price from the Apple product line?
95% of the time you can't. This is what makes Apple a rip-off.
It would only matter that you could not duplicate a Mac cheaper, if the Mac spec were the starting point for shopping. It very rarely is.
Yes, if Apple wins. What however if Apple does not win? Don't be so sure. They thought long and hard before suing and may regret it deeply before this is all over.
This is not at all surprising.
There are all kinds of groups in the West that have no words for things. Like one subculture has no words to express the concept of the temperature of the planet being static, decreasing or even fluctuating randomly. They simply cannot give voice to those concepts. Some anthropologists think this is why they are always saying it is warming, regardless of what the temperatures are actually doing. It is not that they think it is warming in the same way that we would if we said it, its just that they are trying to make conversation about the planet, and this is all that comes out.
This missing vocabulary thing is much more common than people usually realize. Apparently something similar has happened at a lot of financial institutions in the US. They had until recently no concept of down. They always said they were taking the elevator up. When prices fell out of bed, they said they had risen. The thing that really got them was when defaults started to rise. Then they needed words to say they had in fact, well, what had they really done? We knew they could not have risen, so there must have been something else that they could have done. What could that have been?
I hear they are all frantically looking up in thesauruses and dictionaries now, trying to find out how to describe the baffling phenomena they see around them. Must be tough.
People are not addressing the real argument here. Of course no-one wants to live differently. Of course they will resist it, spend more on transport, and so on. Of course they do not want to live near where they work. But its not about wanting, its about how much you pay for what you want.
What will happen in the real world as gas rises to $20+ a gallon, you are too far from work and shops to use an electric car, there's no mass transit because locations are so dispersed, and your employer cannot pay you any more because sales are down? You simply cannot drive 20k miles per year any more, because you don't make enough money to buy the gas.
We will get there relatively gradually, it will not happen next week. But it will come, because this is peak oil and China and India are competing for it too.
People are not going to be able to consume as much gas as they do today, for the simple reason, it will take half or more of their after tax income to do it. How they feel about it is immaterial.
And you say it cannot happen? In the UK right now diesel costs about $10 an imperial gallon. People are stopping driving, they are cycling to the store, and they are turning off their heating boilers and buying coal stoves. And this is just the start.
If you think this is fantasy, you need, to be convincing, to state where the new oil reserves are being found, or what the alternative source of fuel for cars is. It needs to get here soon, like in two three years.
I continue to believe the suburban gasoline driven car based lifestyle is toast, and that its changing will involve real hardship. Yes, electric cars will come. In many parts of the world so will electric bikes! But they will not populate the New Jersey Turnpike or the Long Island Expressway like the rush hour does today, driving the same distances, to and from the same neighborhoods. That is pure fantasy.
As usual, people assume that the problem is the fuel. Its not. Its the lifestyle. People are right to say that nothing can replace gasoline for the lifestyle we currently live. That is why the lifestyle is going to change, because there is not going to be affordable gasoline enough to live like that, and there are going to be no substitutes.
Folks, the 20th century is over. It was great while it lasted, suburbs, drive ins, shopping malls, long distance commutes. But its over. What is going to replace it will not be different fuels, electric cars, whatever. What will replace it is commuting by mass transit, living closer to where you work, moving into high density cities, walking to shops. Biking to work in some places. It will be a lot like Europe in the fifties. The suburbs will vanish.
And you won't like it.
Difference is, parking tickets are not covered by the EC Human Rights convention. This is about access to information, so it is. This is why it will not fly, treating it like parking tickets.
The issue is standards of proof. To be caught doing something illegal on the net three times may seem to justify disconnection. However, simply to be accused of it cannot. The fundamental problem here is economic. The rights owners cannot justify prosecution, because that demands a standard of proof of misconduct which is very expensive. You have to get the evidence, display it, allow it to be subject it to public questioning. Witnesses have to testify to how it was obtained.
This is an attempt to bypass all that. It is far cheaper to simply disconnect on three accusations. However, the problem is going to be EC human rights legislation and the first suit for false accusation. Human rights legislation is going to be a problem because the EC Charter explicitly guarantees access to information. You are only going to be able to ban someone from Internet access with the same sort of evidentiary justification that you would need to ban them from a public library or from reading the newspapers. The first suit for false denial of access to information is, for the same reason, going to be explosive. The ISPs will be acting as a cartel, so where one, acting alone, could throw anyone off for any reason, all acting together are in effect conspiring to deny the person access to information.
One supermarket may ban someone from shopping. If all start to subscribe to a common list, there's a human rights issue.
In the end this is not going to work because you cannot get around the requirement for high standards of proof before depriving people of what the EC, with a different hat on, has defined as their fundamental human rights. Hoist with their own petard, as they say in Brussels!
Copyright law restricts copying. It does not restrict use of the sold material.
Copyright stops it. Copyright is distinct from licensing. What has been ruled out here is post sale restraints on use in so called license terms. Copyright would still stop copying and the release of derivative works.
No, it was a lot worse. 5 years ago there were alternatives to IE6 to access the Web, and they ran on different operating systems, and in addition, earlier versions of IE would run on Macs. Not only that, but IE would run on hardware made by any number of companies.
Hypercard was what MS would probably have liked - that is, pages which could only be written on Windows, and accessed by Windows clients, and served from Windows servers. But it went one step further - all this, and only running on MS branded hardware! To call anything like this an antecedent of the web is ludicrous. If you really want an analogy in network terms, HC was the equivalent of Compuserve or Prodigy. Killed by the web.
Hypercard was in concept the exact opposite of the web.
It was written in a proprietary language, it was only accessible via an application that would run on just one, proprietary, operating system, and this operating system would only run on hardware from one particular manufacturer. Although it was innovative, it was doomed for this reason. It was thought of by Apple as a tool to sell hardware (like everything else they did). The essence of the web was and is that it doesn't matter who supplies the hardware or software you use, and that the material you access and even web based programs are open.
As soon as it turned out to be useless as a hardware selling tool, Apple closed it down. The episode shows that Apple's basic approach to business models and indeed to information and users has not changed in twenty years. Its as authoritarian and closed as ever. It would have been so easy to open source it, or port it to other platforms. You notice by the way a continuing, odd, hangover of this approach in Filemaker. You cannot compile your Filemaker program on a platform other than the one you're going to run it on. You can't compile a Windows executable on a Mac. What a bizarre hangover!
You notice also that Revolution is the only one of the HC successors to have really succeeded, and Revolution is quite the opposite of HC in these respects: it comes for Linux, Windows and Mac, and you can compile your programs on any platform for any platform.
Nostalgia for HC is justified in one respect: it did introduce a great many inventive users to programming, and probably many of them moved on to less kindergarten languages. This was valuable. But in all other respects, business model, lockins, closed format and so on, in all those respects we should all be profoundly grateful that the HyperCard model died. Intellectual freedom would have been the loser had it succeeded on the sale some of the nostalgics wish.
It was King Arthur and the Round Table of course, these kings, who were the lost tribe of Israel as explained by the British Israel movement, they had come to the UK by routes which we no longer know about. They were, like, the original inhabitants. They had powers now lost to us and erected the stones by thinking. They were vegan, lined up their stones with the planets and the ley lines. They were like very ecological and in harmony with the environment. Later they painted themselves purple with natural plant extracts. They were priest kings. They were real left or is it right side of the brain people unlike the Romans. Like, whatever.
Are there any more questions?
"bundle it with Macs"
That's the problem in a nutshell.
Bundle it with computers bought by schools and universities, maybe. Or, offer deep educational discounts for academic institutions, regardless of OS and hardware flavor, yes, also maybe.
Bundle it just with Macs is the high road to the ghetto, yet again.
The real problem with HC was the Cupertino lockin mentality. They have always had this tension between a software group, which would, if left to its own devices and tasked with maximizing the business, sell on all platforms - third party hardware in the case of the OS, or Windows and Unix as well as Mac OS in the case of Hypercard. They've even had the same tension with hardware - if they cut the hardware group loose, they would probably sell millions of designer computers with Windows rather than OSX preinstalled.
You can see the potential realized in the case of Filemaker. When released to Windows, it turned into a real business and did not hurt the Mac at all. You can also see it in the case of iTunes. But with Hypercard, the mania for Mac-only solutions to promote the sale of Macs resulted in the destruction of what could have been a great standalone business unit. In effect, Apple forced the creation of Visual Basic, and then forced people to take it up, by denying them the product they would have bought if they Apple had just made it available. E-World was the same blinkered and doomed thinking. And in the early days of Classic, in effect they forced people who wanted computers to Windows, when they would probably rather have, many of them, had Macs. Apple could not meet the demand, and would not meet the price. But the customers had to have computers, so they bought from people who would sell to them. Who can blame them?
In a typical show of pique, they then killed HC rather than, for instance, open source it. The attitude seems to have been that if we could not make it work, and make it work on our platforms only, then no-one should have it. In case they made something of it?
Apple has done well in recent years. But nothing like as well as it could have done if it had bent its efforts to allowing the really creative groups in Apple to form business units and take their products to market and follow the trail of demand. And if it had stopped spending so much energy on stopping people buying Apple products because their requirements did not exactly fit in all respects with the Cupertino model of what they should be.
If we look at the recent results in absolute terms, it seems a great story. If we look at what could have been, its the record of a company consistently failing to realize the potential of its own creativity. Crippling it, in fact.
The essential conceptual failure is the failure to appreciate that the fact that something is impossible to run on non-Apple systems is not a benefit to the Apple user. It applies to OSX as much as to e-world as to Filemaker. Its a focus on delivering what you think is your prime quality, integration, while failing to see that your real strength is as an innovator and business segment creator.
"If they lose, they null and void all the EULA's in existence"
No they do not. They just null and void the particular clause restricting where you have to buy the hardware on which you run the software sold. In this case the OS. Every EULA clause stands or falls on its merits. This particular clause has none and is not enforceable. Others may be enforceable. The problem is not with the clause being in a EULA. The problem is with the clause itself, however agreed to. You cannot enforce contractual clauses contrary to the law of the jurisdiction. That's why they are not suing.
All purchased copies are legal and legitimate whatever they run on. No restraint on the source of your hardware is going to hold up in court, which is why Apple has not sued Psystar and never will. Nor will they sue the next one to do it. Some Eula terms are valid and enforceable, this one is not.
Do this too much, and this is where you end up:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/iraq.humanrights
Where murder is not really murder, if its done by the right people with the right motives.
It is built in to Slax, Kill Bill edition.
Yes, its not going to be wind powered at all. What is in fact going to happen is that it will be connected to the grid. It will generate enough electricity to power the town, but not in a form which is usable by the town or anyone else, because it will be too variable. So, they will draw power from the grid like everyone else, exactly as before, the same amount at the same times, and also go through the motions of selling back wind generated power which is useless to the electricity company connecting them to the grid.
If everyone did this, the only result would be that the utility company would have to raise prices. Its demand would not change, its generating capacity would not change.
But we would all feel an awful lot better.
This is plain wrong. You bought a copy. What restrains you from making multiple copies is not the license but copyright. Cite a couple cases. There are none.
The problem is not that you have picked a Mac, and now want to find the exact same thing but cheaper. This you cannot do usually.
The problem is, you have picked a spec of a PC based on the performance you need and the money you have, and want to find similar performance for the same price in a Mac. This also you cannot do. The reason is, the product line consists either of junk you can put in a coat pocket, which you do not particularly want to do, or small unexpandable boxes which unaccountably have screens welded to them, or large standalones which when properly equipped cost...as much as your car.
So as you stare at what's on offer, you not unreasonably conclude that by comparison to what you actually need, Macs are way too expensive. What you need is real simple, its something with the the kind of spec you can buy anyplace for under $1,000, and without another screen welded to it, when you prefer your screens separate, and anyway, you have three perfectly good ones and don't see why you should be forced to buy a fourth.
This is one of the weirdest arguments you hear on this subject. If Apple hardware is so great, why are clones a threat at all? What about all those arguments showing that every time anyone tries to duplicate a Mac, they end up spending more? Why on earth would Mac buyers move to cheap junk, if Apple hardware is such great value, and it works so well with the OS?
Or could it be that Apple hardware is not that great value, not cost effective, doesn't work with the OS any better than any other hardware, and that Mac buyers are only putting up with it so as to get the OS, and that given half a chance they would move to hardware they really want....? And this is why clones really are a threat?
Three wrong statements:
1) Its illegal in the US. It is not. It may be actionable in civil law. They are different.
2) They are installing unlawful copies of OSX. There is no evidence of this. They seem to be installing copies purchased at retail, not directly from Apple on OEM terms.
3) OSX is only available as an upgrade. No it is not. They are sold at retail, and do not require a preexisting installation.
MacFud!
It has nothing to do with copyright. Copyright does not permit restraints on use, but on copying, which is quite different.
You have a situation in which two materially identical machines sit on a bench. They have the same mainboard, memory, opticals, disk drives, processor, network and graphics cards. The power supplies may be the same or different. The cases are different. One uses EFI, the other an EFI to bios emulator. Those are trivial differences in computer specification terms. The main difference is where you buy these components from. One set you buy assembled from Apple. The other set you buy assembled from your local computer shop.
We are asked to believe that Apple can stop you installing on these components if bought from the computer shop, but allow you to install on the same set when bought from them. No way. Produce a case to support it. You will not find one. This is cut and dried, open and shut, in terms of competition law. You can't stop people using THE IDENTICAL STUFF with your product just because they did not buy it from you. This is a hopeless one. As soon as they went to totally standard components, the argument was going to be reduced to 'but you didn't buy them from me', and it was game over.