• 4 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 19th, 2024

help-circle







  • EULAs don’t have to say “you own this forever” because it’s implicit. Just like when you buy bananas at the grocer you aren’t forced to sign a EULA that says you can eat the banana or make a smoothie with it but can’t use it to make nuclear weapons or commit war crimes.

    Let’s break this down: a product is an object that is delivered to a buyer. A service is an action or group of actions that is performed for the buyer. If I have to keep running my servers for your game client to connect to, push updates or offer tech support, I am providing a service because it requires me to keep doing something for the thing to work. If, on the other hand, all I do is give you some code you can run entirely on your machine - and it doesn’t matter if I give it to you on a CD, a floppy, via digital download or if I print it out as a big book for you to type yourself into a hex editor - then our transaction is finished when I deliver it to you and you pay me. There isn’t anything to license because now you own that copy of the code. My participation in what you do with it is finished, just like the grocer’s is finished when you leave his store with the bananas.

    Do you understand now?



  • No, crimes exist for whoever isn’t in power. There are several crimes that can only be committed by rich people, such as those related to banking and the stock market, formation of cartels* and monopolistic/anti-competitive practices, etc. But conveniently the criminals are only prosecuted when they are the political or commercial opponents of whoever happens to be in charge at the time.

    *Not the drug kind, the “a small group of companies with a combined market majority conspires to fix prices while pretending to compete with each other” kind









  • But if you read a primary source, that’s one persom who had the opportunity to make stuff up. With a secondary source, even if the primary it’s based on is legit, there’s some other guy who wasn’t there and may either be lying to you or misinterpreting the primary source his report is based on. Each new level of isolation adds another opportunity to stack both lies and mistakes onto the data.

    It’s not that you can’t go wrong with primary sources. It’s that you can go a lot wronger without them.