[OT] EULA and legality

[Kay C Lan]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 11:12 PM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>wrote:

> The other day I was pruning fruit trees in our garden in our country villa
> here in Bulgaria,
> using a ladder I bought (logically enough) in a B & Q store in Dundee,
> Scotland. I noticed there was
> a sticker attached to it that said "not recommended for people over 90
> kilos"; this was rather funny
> insofar as I weigh 93 kilos (and have done for years). Presumably if the
> ladder were to buckle under
> me the makers would, quite rightly, say "you were warned, hard cheese, you
> won't get a red penny
> out of us". What they have done is set limits on how far they are prepared
> to fork out if the ladder
> breaks, what they have NOT done is stated that heavy numbers like me are
> not allowed to use the
> thing; at my own risk of course. Now that seems reasonable.
>
> A sticker on my ladder saying "Fatties like you (90 kilos and over) cannot
> use this thing, and this is part
> of a EULA" seems quite unreasonable.
>
>
Interesting, whilst I agree with the general gist of your post, and that
Apple simply use the EULA so they don't have to support OS X users who are
using it in VMs or on hackintoshes, I don't agree with your presumption
about the 90 kilo recommendation.

Unless there was something else in the EULA for the ladder that indicated
that the 90 kg was a structural limit then if I bought the ladder and it
bent under the weight of 93 kgs I'd be going back for a refund and buying a
better one. The 90 kg recommendation must be non-structural, stability is
the first thing that comes to mind. The larger the person you put at the
top of a ladder the easier it is for that person to topple the ladder.
Based on the width of the legs the manufacturer may have simply determined
that above 90 kgs the ladder is more easily toppled, not that it would
break. Also you have the size of the feet. Depending on their size/tread,
above 90 kg the psi might be such that the feet will sink into soft soil,
or bruise wood floors.

If on the other hand the ladder will actually bend, buckle or break at a
load above 90 kg, I would think it appallingly negligent of the
manufacturer NOT to put a sticker that said, MAX LOAD 22.5 KG (that's
assuming of course an engineering safety factor of 4 - typical for
ladders). In some countries Opperational Health and Safety laws require
ladders to come with Max Load stickers.