The Not-So-Funny Farm

7 Replies to “The Not-So-Funny Farm”

1. Also on the funny farm – you do not own and thus cannot “fix” the software on your John Deere tractor.
   We Can’t let John Deere destroy the very idea of ownership (Wired Magazine)

   It’s official: John Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don’t own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway.
   In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
   It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.
   . . .
   It makes sense to John Deere: The company argues that allowing people to alter the software—even for the purpose of repair—would “make it possible for pirates, third-party developers, and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software.”

   I remember when the only software on a tractor was that which you sat on. (that is, if you had one with a padded seat)

2. failure to purchase a “lease” of a john deere tractor will quickly change their attitude, because bankruptcy has a way of changing attitudes. the deere people fail to realize that when I purchase something I own it and all that is encompassed within it. I know that Microsoft can shut down my personal computer but try that with my home or car and I would shut them down.

3. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that since “progressives?” took over University Campuses that they have gone from one of the freest places on earth (with a healthy inclusive discourse and a free market place of Ideas) to one of the darkest, repressed, ideologically monopolistic and authoritarian places in our nations – like small bits of the old soviet union on free soil.
   Our academia are demented and driving the bus on the road to hell.

4. Texas Tech is a public university, so it is flat illegal for it to do what they have done. Time for a lawsuit.

5. Confiscating farm equipment over some stupid lizard or cutting off water over some idiotic fish or mice is STUPID

6. “Did you read the license agreement?”
   “Yes!”
   “Which part?”
   “I AGREE!”
   One can argue whether software licenses are legally binding, but at the end of the day if you’re buying something as expensive as a tractor without reading all the contracts, you don’t get to complain when the contract screws you over.
   Besides which, I work with embedded software developers. Trust me when I say that the people who write the code embedded in these things barely know what they’re doing; I’m skeptical that the average farmer is going to end up doing anything but bricking their $50,000 tractor if they start messing around in its firmware.

7. Universities: petri dishes of puerile putridity.