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Originally Posted by Winni View Post
1. Just because Apple has put this in a license agreement does not make it a law.
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Actually, it does. Thats the entire point of having a user agreement in the first place.
No, it doesn't. Authors of EULAs have never had the ability to create laws through their license terms. You are confusing creating something that falls under the provisions of existing laws and can be enforced per those laws and creating a law itself.
False again. You're breaking a legal contract you agreed to when you pressed that button. Simple as that.
Almost every breach of contract claim can be argued against by addressing the various components of a valid contract (offer, consideration, mutual assent at the moment of acceptance, capacity, and legality); i.e. if it is not a valid contract in the first place then there is no breach. I'm fuzzy on the details, but one of the arguments made in Germany (?) was that since the EULA could not be viewed until after purchase, it was not valid because the moment of acceptance (as was argued?) was at purchase time. I don't know how that was resolved or if it is still being argued, but that is neither here nor there -- it's just an example that contracts are never "simple as that". You are right that most likely for all practical purposes (especially given the recent Psystar case) that Apple's EULA would be considered valid in most cases (note though that the fact it is found valid in the case of one user does not necessary make it valid for all other users, as each contract is separate).
Again, not always (it is not illegal if the contract is not a contract in the first place per the criteria mentioned earlier)
Lets break out the elementary school level explanation!
contract
noun |ˈkänˌtrakt|
a written or spoken agreement, esp. one concerning employment, sales, or tenancy, that is intended to be enforceable by law : both parties must sign employment contracts | a network of doctors and hospitals under contract to provide services.
the branch of law concerned with the making and observation of such agreements.
Law is something that unfortunately cannot easily be distilled into simple definitions, as someone inevitably will find a loophole, which will cause the definition to be amended, etc, etc. Wikipedia has
a good reference on contract law (with sources cited if you're interested in further reading from actual sources)
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2. However, the question still is whether the conditions of this EULA are legal.
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Its Apple's software, they own it, they can do with it as they like. If you don't like the terms, you aren't being forced to buy it and there are several alternative operating systems to choose from when building a computer.
I think his point is that if the EULA itself specifies any action that is illegal, then it is not a valid contract. Apple can't set
whatever terms it wants (e.g. it clearly can't set a term that any user of OSX must dive off a cliff carrying the Apple product to demonstrate how durable it is in order to be allowed to use the software).
Also, this is just an aside, but there seems to be a tendency to equate something that's "illegal" with something that is morally detestable or criminal, both of which does not necessarily follow from illegality.
Is it illegal to violate Apple's EULA? Probably (most likely now given the Psystar case).
Is it morally wrong to violate Apple's EULA? This more debatable than the illegality of the issue and I get the feeling this is what most people are trying to argue when they instead argue about legality.
Is it a CRIME to violate Apple's EULA? No. Breach of contract is not a crime; it falls under civil law, not criminal law. i.e. you are not committing a felony or misdemeanor simply by virtue of breaching a contract.
[Other stuff irrelevant to legal stuff]
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Just a quick note about people who build Hackintoshes being poor: that doesn't really follow, logically. Even people who are doing it for cost reasons may not necessarily be poor. I know many people who could afford a Mac one thousand times over who would rather build a Hackintosh because they do not value a Mac at the price that it's set at. The whole concept behind a price is that it represents a certain value: people who value a product at or above that value are willing to pay it, and people who value a product below that value are not,
regardless of whether or not they can afford it in the first place. There are also many people in the OSx86 community who are involved simply because they like technological exploration and the knowledge that comes from working on such a project -- in short, there are way too many reasons for "hackintoshing" to be able to draw a clear relationship between it and "being poor".
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Originally Posted by phaedarus View Post
How many games take advantage of more than 2 cores let alone 8?
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Pretty much everything written within the last 9 years.
Haha this is just blatantly not true. Most games are still not multithreaded to the extent that they take advantage of more than two cores.
Here's one source (slightly outdated - May 2008 - but this hasn't really changed in the past year and a half)
http://www.guru3d.com/article/cpu-scaling-in-games-with-quad-core-processors/
Conclusions page (last page) said:
So then, the hardcore truth today is a very simple fact: you'll gain a better bang for buck in your games from a faster clocked dual-core processor opposed to having a somewhat slower clocked quad-core processor. That doesn't mean though that quad-core processors offers less value. Contrary, and I know I've been evangelizing it for over a year now, but the future is multi-core gaming, the fact is just that dual-core is the sweet spot value wise anno 2008 as 95% of the games still only use one and maybe two CPU cores.
