[OT] EULA and legality

[Richmond]

I am asking this question for a number of reasons:

1. If I buy a book I can, if I want, use it for lighting a fire, 
throwing at the cat, and so on. As the book
     is my property I can do what I like with it. The intellectual 
property contained within the book is,
     generally, restricted by copyright saying whether I can copy bits 
of it, resell it, lend it to friends,
     lend it while charging a fee for its use, and so on. However, the 
copyright restrictions do not tell me
     where I can read the book (in the bath?) or how (standing on my head?).

2. I am running Mac Snow Leopard in VMplayer on Non-Apple hardware.

Before I continue, I should point out that as I own a physical install 
disk for Mac OS Snow Leopard
I don't feel MORALLY wrong running the software it contains in VMplayer. 
I am running software I own
in one instance and do not feel that because I bought Ferrari hubcaps 
for my Lada I should be forced
to buy a Ferrari.

3. Other people on the Use-List must face similar questions.

4. I really wonder if this belongs in the same category as the previous 
set of postings about
     software piracy - I don't feel it does.

A. How legally binding is a EULA?

B. I have connected to Apple via software upgrade, so, one assumes, they 
are well aware that at
     least one person "out there" is violating the EULA.

C. Anybody can purchase software online or in a shop without background 
checks to see whether
     one has the necessary hardware to keep to the EULA.

Of course this can extend to Livecode, and all the products we folk are 
doing our best to produce
with it.

There are also some 'funny' rumours flying about that Microsoft are 
doing some deals with PC makers that will lock the machines in some way 
so that they will only function with Microsoft Operating Systems, rather 
than Linux, UNIX, Haiku and so on.

Richmond.