Saturday, December 16, 2006
Yours?
Wink: Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.
There are a couple of things I have a hard time understanding in this modern high technology world of ours.
You can go out and buy a new computer system with your hard earned dollars, and the computer hardware is yours. Your receipt proves it, especially if you require warranty service.
But you don't own the operating system. You pay top dollar for it, have a receipt for it and even a certificate of authenticity, but it is not yours. Check the licence agreement. You can't even put it on another machine should you decide to upgrade in a few years. In fact in a lot of cases it won't work if you just change hardware on the machine it was already on. You are paying for software to use on a computer that is yours, but you can't change anything on it, and you have to allow that company access to supposedly private codes on your hard drive to prove the computer is yours and the software is theirs. Nope, I am not talking about Linux.
You buy your favourite music CD. You have a receipt that it is yours. If someone steals it and you can prove ownership by special marking or whatever, it is yours if police find the culprits. But if you want to copy it, change it to MP3 format for use in your car or on the iPod, suddenly you can't. It's not yours.
Buy your favourite movie on DVD, the receipt from the store says its yours, you paid for it. But you can't make a backup copy of it, that's illegal, even though you know little Jeannie is going to jam it in the player after jammin' it with the jam toast for breakfast.
How many other thngs do you go out and buy so that it will be yours, but it is not yours?
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
There are a couple of things I have a hard time understanding in this modern high technology world of ours.
You can go out and buy a new computer system with your hard earned dollars, and the computer hardware is yours. Your receipt proves it, especially if you require warranty service.
But you don't own the operating system. You pay top dollar for it, have a receipt for it and even a certificate of authenticity, but it is not yours. Check the licence agreement. You can't even put it on another machine should you decide to upgrade in a few years. In fact in a lot of cases it won't work if you just change hardware on the machine it was already on. You are paying for software to use on a computer that is yours, but you can't change anything on it, and you have to allow that company access to supposedly private codes on your hard drive to prove the computer is yours and the software is theirs. Nope, I am not talking about Linux.
You buy your favourite music CD. You have a receipt that it is yours. If someone steals it and you can prove ownership by special marking or whatever, it is yours if police find the culprits. But if you want to copy it, change it to MP3 format for use in your car or on the iPod, suddenly you can't. It's not yours.
Buy your favourite movie on DVD, the receipt from the store says its yours, you paid for it. But you can't make a backup copy of it, that's illegal, even though you know little Jeannie is going to jam it in the player after jammin' it with the jam toast for breakfast.
How many other thngs do you go out and buy so that it will be yours, but it is not yours?
This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
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