So I presume all my iPhone owning friends out there must have encountered the new terms and conditions for the iTunes store recently. I suspect you just pressed “Agree” and soldiered bravely on in the face of ignorance. Perhaps you didn’t notice what it said right at the bottom: Page 1 of 90 ‘ let’s just say that again: 1 of 90 – that’s NINETY pages of legalise to sift through (or I suspect not)
Did you read the bit about Apple employees being able to pop around and borrow your pants if they haven’t got any clean ones ? Didn’t think so. It also mentions that Steve can come and shag your girlfriend if he fancies and you will have to bring up their lovechild willingly and “NEVER LET IT NEAR A PC”
Hey, I jest, but frankly in ninety pages it really could say absolutely anything and we’d all be non-the-wiser. Which rather raises the question should there not be some legal standard about what is realistic for a normal busy non-legal human being to digest? What’s wrong with some bullet points so we can scan through and see if there’s anything utterly ludicrous that we can decide whether we really do want to agree to or otherwise. Sending me a ninety page document just seems downright sneaky to my mind. Are you trying to hide something from me Steve?
I’ve taken the precaution of double locking the front door just in case he turns up in the middle of the night whilst I’m asleep…
Top Ten facts about the new Apple terms and Conditions:
- It takes 31 seconds to select the entire text in Gmail. Yes, that’s 31 seconds just to select it!
- It contains 24,321 words. (according to the MS Word count)
- It would take an average human writing at 21 words a minute 18 hours and 25 minutes to copy the entire terms and conditions. This is what Apple employees who incur the wrath of Steve have to do as penance.
- A Stenographer working at 250wpm could do it in 1 hour 37 minutes and 17 seconds. They may die of boredom before they got to the end however.
- If it was turned into an audio book it would last 2 hours 32 minutes. If you were listening on an iPod you’d probably have thrown it under a bus before the first hour was over.
- 24321 is the last five digits of the phone number of a girl I met at a party in Islington, whom I completely failed to get off with.
- 24,321 miles is 0.98 x the equatorial circumference of the earth – and hurray, I finally found a use for Wolfram Alpha!
- 24,321 is 0.48 times the radius of the galaxy (and I promise no more nonsense from Wolfram Alpha)
- Pasting the T&Cs into Google gives an amusing error! Try it here.
- Pasting the T&Cs into Bing doesn’t give an error, but gives a very bizarre result. Try it here. Or actually maybe you shouldn’t it seemed to crash Chrome the last time I tried it.
- There is no number 11, this is a TOP TEN remember?