XP Service Pack 2 Bomb

[mtrawls]

Originally Posted by Nick Fury

A: It's not illegal for them to do that. They write the EULAs and the users agree to 'em.
...
It is a legally binding license and MS has far more lawyers and legal power than a pirate so I'm fairly certain these issues have been addressed.

(emphasis mine)

Wazzuh!?! Come again? It should be mentioned that EULAs have as yet to be tested in a court of law, and their binding legal ability is in *serious* question. Consider: the user buys the product, but only gets to read the EULA afterwards, by the time of which the user cannot take it back on the grounds that the user disagrees with the provisions in the EULA, -- forced compliance, if you will. Then consider the quasi-legally significant point that next to no one actually reads the blasted things. And MS could very well put in a provision that the user owes Bill their first born son (and for all I know that provision is lurking in there somewhere), and the user could agree to it with the supposedly "legally binding" EULA, -- yet no court of law would possibly hold such a proposition as valid. Ignore for a moment the huge negative publicity that Microsoft would undergo with such a move (and too the point that it is to Microsoft's advantage to patch even pirated copies). As a matter of pure legality, MS could not perform such a move. If they did, their EULA would come under serious scrutiny, which would be bad for their business practice. And, try to think how a judge could rule that MS had authority to erase or do anything harmful to the user's hard drive. MS would have to own it, but by running a piece of software, pirated or not, no ownership is transferred.

Edit: blasted! beated because of my woefully stringent editing standards. (okay, okay, ... I got distracted by something shiny. but I was editing)