A Game Shark modifies memory locations within a game.
It's, gasp, modifying the game!
Cheat codes are things you type in in the game. There is no way, within GTA, to get to this minigame, via pressing buttons, documented or otherwise, or doing things with your character.
Seriously, we're having some sort of total terminology failure here.
Here is the actual facts. If anyone is found repeating anything else, they will be beaten publically, and a minigame around that will be included in the next GTA:
This minigame, like all minigame, is enabled when you do certain things. Rockstar removed these things from the game, and thus you cannot, under any circumstances, get to the minigame from within the game.
What all the mods do, either the Game Shark or the saved game hack, is tell GTA that you have, in fact, completed these nonexistent prerequisites.
There is a debate if one of the hacks adds a nude texture for the female, but I don't see any evidence of that.
Um, YES, they do, at least the nude content. They use them when sims take a shower.
The game puts blurring on top of them, but they are actually nude under there. In fact, sometimes the blurring gets confused about sightlines and thinks an object is in the way and doesn't blur, when it's not. And you can see little naked sims.
I don't know how to make it happen, but I've had houses where if I'm looking from a certain angle, they leave off the blur when people get in the shower. I'm sure teenage boys have spent hours on this figuring this out, and can build a hour where it happens from all angles.;)
The noblur patches just turn the blurring off. They don't add anything.
Not to be confused with the patches that correctly shade the nude models, or make 'nudity' a clothing option, which do add content.
And while the sim doesn't include any sexual animation, it does include what is refered to as 'adult themes'...namely, two guys passionately kissing.
Yes, but that would actually require spending more than two seconds deciding on whether you should spend 50 dollars on week worth of activities for your kid.
And, look, if parents had to spend more than two seconds every time they wanted the kid to shut up for a week, they'd never get anything done.
In the real world, (and everyone in existence things this way except you, so deal), the default is 'be secure' and the other choice is 'or make an informed choice to be insecure'.
The other way around is completely fucking idiotic, and I'm sorry but there's no other way to describe it. People cannot possibly personally vet every single thing they own, and constantly check that hasn't been discovered it is dangerous.
However, everyone else make a note: It's okay to give Tom Hudson broken things and never inform him how dangerous they are. Luckily, we won't have to do this for long, because he will 'choose' to continue to use a car with an exploding gas tank.
Your fault for not reading the Ford owner's newsletter, I guess. Obviously, if you use Ford cars, you read their newsletter.
But forgive us if we operate as if you've already been killed and issue the updates by default. In the long term, it doesn't matter if you get killed today or tomorrow.
The ESRB (or the people before them) tried that with video game ratings. It had thermostats with various things on it. Remember? I think the original Sims had it.
It was apparently 'too complicated' or something. Because parents are too lazy.
Not knowing the difference between sitting in the driver's seat and actually driving a car?
And how the hell would a seven year old know the difference between the two modes: 'The car will move if you do obscure things with your hands and feet.' and 'The car will not move if you do obscure things with your hands and feet, because I have the keys.'?
Refusing to get in the seat at all is completely sane behavior.
If someone sat me in a 747 cockpit with all the lights on and said 'Why don't you push some buttons and pretend to fly us around a bit?', I'd refuse to touch anything, too, except maybe turn the wheel a bit. You, of course, would be fine because you'd magically know the landing gear button and throttle were disabled because we were in some sort of simulation mode...
The absolute best thing a person can ever know is when to not attempt to do something that might be dangerous. And it's almost always best to err on the side of caution. SomeoneGotMyNick's kid is way smarter than most seven year olds I know, and hopefully will continue to be as smart during the 'I AM INVINCIBLE!' stage that teenagers go through.
It's not 'laziness' to remove unreachable parts of a program, it's fucking quality control.
When you've tested a program and it works, you don't willynilly remove sections of code, graphics, and sounds.
You want to disable something, you just change a single test. Instead of 'if (a==2)', you make it 'if (a==-50)' or 'if (1==0)' or something.
In this case, as this was a specific minigame you had to earn, they just removed the stuff that let you earn it. Which didn't even require any code changes at all, just the removal of something from the map.
Somehow I get the idea that 99% of people here have never actually worked on a large programming project or know anything about the programming industry.
This is perfectly normal programming practices. Once you test something, you change it as little as possible. Almost every large program has extra parts laying around.
As the minigames probably have a standard way of saying 'You can get to this one', someone noticed there was a minigame that you could never earn, and flipped that bit on to see what the game was.
If Rockstar had been thinking, they would have filtered out that bit when loading the saved game files, thus requiring at least a program patch, but it wasn't some attempt to slip past the ratings, nor was it laziness. That's just how you program.
It's a hell of a lot better than spending months on testing and then, at least last second, diking out large sections of code because someone realized they couldn't get a M rating, which instead results in a M rated program that runs fine, except 30 minutes after you steal your fifteenth car, the game crashes.
We think the ratings are absurd too. We remember being 16, and we know damn well we could handle those games.
The thing is, if we don't have ratings, we'll have real censorship. So we all pretend the ratings are good.
We can say outloud 'Don't restrict what I can do because you can't control your kids' at the same time we're thinking 'Your kids are probably twice as smart as you and understand what's going on better than you do. And can download the games anyway.'.
Likewise we can complain about the hypocrisy of a game where you repeated commit violent felonies being rated M, but one where you control a full clothed person during sex supposedly being rated AO. (1) While at the same time, we can think 'Neither sex or violence in a game is really any problem at all.'.
In other words, don't blow the scam we've got going. Continue to download warez copies of GTA or get your unwitting parents to buy them. The point isn't to fix anything, it's to trick the people whining into shutting up or, at least, make them look like idiots when they talk about sex and violence in a game kids aren't supposed to have.
Come on. You know you're all thinking exactly like this.
1) Not saying that GTA should be rated AO, but everyone seems to be thinking that if minigame actually been in there, it would be AO.
There is no such thing as the Creative Commons 'Public Domain License', you fucktard, and if you'd done a bit of research you'd have noticed that.
There is a Creative Commons 'Public Domain Declaration', which is grouped and classified along with the various CC licenses so it's machine readable by the various things that read CC licenses. We're sorry if it somehow upsets you for a document to have an encoded way of saying it's in the public domain.
This declaration, obviously, functions identically to all other public domain declarations, and no one has ever claimed otherwise, except possibly some poor blogger somewhere who called it by the wrong name.
And, BTW, you haven't have to say 'Copyright' for the last two decades to get a copyright on something, you idiot.
It is fair use to quote someone in a discussion, especially if the quote is available in the same way as the original.
They didn't expect any compensation anyway, and had already implicitly granted permission to have that text copied every time that web page or usenet post showed up.
That has nothing to do with 'research' or 'education'.
However, it's legal to quote people anyway. If you're quoting something that's written down, more than likely you're either quoting a tiny fraction of the work, which is permissionable under fair use, or it was extremely small to start with and, thus not copyrightable.
Or, like with slashdot text, it was something that had no value to start with, and you already gave permission, by merely posting it, for slashdot to copy it millions of time. There may be a technical copyright violation, but absolutely no damages. (And you were copying it to comment on it, so you might even get in under fair use.)
And if you're quoting someone speaking, that's not copyrighted anyway. To be subject to a copyright, it has to be in a fixed medium, and sound waves are not a fixed medium.
Almost all discussions of 'copyright' in education are either aimed at teachers (Which have a whole host of issues to deal with.) or are aimed at students and are actually about plagiarism , which isn't illegal at all, just a damn stupid thing to do. It's nearly impossible for a student to commit a copyright violation in a paper.
Why, does it say it's a 'license' in anyway? Why no, it doesn't, because it's not. It's a dedication. It's a way to say you are placing something in the public domain. That is, in fact, the legal term for placing a non-expired copyrighted work in the public domain, you 'dedicate' it to the public domain.
It also add that, as far as you know, you own the copyright to the work, or it is already public domain, which is something copyright law requires in a dedication.
And that you know exactly what 'Public Domain' means, that you are giving up any rights to it you or your heir might have, which is not required by copyright law, but cuts down on the lawyers.
Yes, you can, in theory, say 'Copyright 2005 John Smith, released into the public domain'. But you'd be amazed how many people don't know what 'public domain' means.
I have no issue at all with them making a risk/benefits analysis.
Of course, as not all of them read slashdot, I'm at a loss as to how you think that's going to happen sans them updating and finding out why their scripts don't work.
It is IRRESPONSIBLE behavior to NOT give users, via the normal upgrade path, critical security updates, even if those upgrades cripple something. And this is about as critical an update as they come. Or have you forgotten that your computer contains a lot of passwords?
In fact, they should remove the old releases, and if they had a way to force users to upgrade, they should have used it. (Although, thankfully, they don't have that option, because that could be used for malicious purposes.)
And what the hell are you talking about, them not being open? Go and read about it if you want know about it. It's very clearly explained what's going on.
Of course, by your analogy, Tylenol shouldn't have removed its products from the shelves until a new shipment arrived. Some people might have been willing to take the risks, because they had a really bad headache, and heaven forbid Tylenol not allow people to harm themselves using Tylenol's products.
I find it astonishing that anyone can even pretend to complain about this updating automatically. I was about to complain about the fact it apparently wasn't, at least not before I removed it.
Instead of a 'foes' list, I think we need a 'stupid morons' list.
People who don't understand this security flaw need to SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Greasemonkey 'adds' stuff to Javascript. Any page on the internet can use these additions.
If you have Greasemonkey installed, and Javascript enabled (Greasemonkey is rather pointless without Javascript anyway.), you are at risk.
You can't 'be safe' by only doing certain things, because the flaw is that any page on the internet can call Greasemonkey functions. (Any page that can use Javascript, at least.) It has nothing to do with you.
It is possible to use Greasemonkey with the NoScript extension to disable Javascript globally and then re-enable it only on a few trusted sites...but no one uses Greasemonkey on 'trusted' sites, we use(d) it to hack up stupid-ass pages that had eight square inch of content per page with the rest ads and fancy graphics.
If you absolutely require Greasemonkey to make some internal site work, and are willing to disable Javascript on the entire rest of the internet, NoScript might be worth a try. Otherwise, get rid of Greasemonkey, NOW.
Ha, I just complained about this higher up the page.
If people are going to writing tricks in Javascript and installing them into Firefox, and they clearly are, than there needs to be a security context for that. In fact, it would be nice to be able to configure exactly what 'local' scripts could do, and restrict them, for example, from reading files outside of a certain directory.
And if goes without saying that scripts in web pages shouldn't be able to access local scripts, and probably safer for everyone if that went both ways.
I use an extension called NoScript, it disables Javascript by default, and I can turn it on per site, and even make it temporary. It can do that bar like you get when installing extensions or blocking popups, but I just keep the icon down in the status bar.
It's even better than the 'per-tab' control you can get with various buttons, because it not only remembers each site, but it lets you turn on, say, slashdot.org, and not 'falkag.net', which right now apparently has scripts on this page.
The problem is, unless I enable javascript on a page, the damn Greasemonkey scripts don't work on it either.
I forget how the ratings work, I have them completely turned off. But you might have something odd there.
The post I replied to said: 'she hadn't held that classification since 97 and was just a regular CIA employee.'
Which is, a very silly assertation, because you can't go from being a NOC to saying 'Oh, yeah, now I magically work for the CIA without any training or anything. That energy company I worked at? They let me go. But luckily the CIA had an ad in a newspaper asking for a desk job for analyzing intelligence, and...what do you mean, what experience do I have working in the intelligence field? Erm, I mean, I'll pick it up as I go along, I guess.'.
'What do you mean, how long have I really worked for the CIA?'
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, it is perfectly legal to sell people cyanide. That analogy makes no sense.
*the universe disappears and is replaced by something even stranger*
A Game Shark modifies memory locations within a game.
It's, gasp, modifying the game!
Cheat codes are things you type in in the game. There is no way, within GTA, to get to this minigame, via pressing buttons, documented or otherwise, or doing things with your character.
Seriously, we're having some sort of total terminology failure here.
Here is the actual facts. If anyone is found repeating anything else, they will be beaten publically, and a minigame around that will be included in the next GTA:
This minigame, like all minigame, is enabled when you do certain things. Rockstar removed these things from the game, and thus you cannot, under any circumstances, get to the minigame from within the game.
What all the mods do, either the Game Shark or the saved game hack, is tell GTA that you have, in fact, completed these nonexistent prerequisites.
There is a debate if one of the hacks adds a nude texture for the female, but I don't see any evidence of that.
The game puts blurring on top of them, but they are actually nude under there. In fact, sometimes the blurring gets confused about sightlines and thinks an object is in the way and doesn't blur, when it's not. And you can see little naked sims.
I don't know how to make it happen, but I've had houses where if I'm looking from a certain angle, they leave off the blur when people get in the shower. I'm sure teenage boys have spent hours on this figuring this out, and can build a hour where it happens from all angles. ;)
The noblur patches just turn the blurring off. They don't add anything.
Not to be confused with the patches that correctly shade the nude models, or make 'nudity' a clothing option, which do add content.
And while the sim doesn't include any sexual animation, it does include what is refered to as 'adult themes'...namely, two guys passionately kissing.
And, look, if parents had to spend more than two seconds every time they wanted the kid to shut up for a week, they'd never get anything done.
But not the condoms.
In the real world, (and everyone in existence things this way except you, so deal), the default is 'be secure' and the other choice is 'or make an informed choice to be insecure'.
The other way around is completely fucking idiotic, and I'm sorry but there's no other way to describe it. People cannot possibly personally vet every single thing they own, and constantly check that hasn't been discovered it is dangerous.
However, everyone else make a note: It's okay to give Tom Hudson broken things and never inform him how dangerous they are. Luckily, we won't have to do this for long, because he will 'choose' to continue to use a car with an exploding gas tank.
Your fault for not reading the Ford owner's newsletter, I guess. Obviously, if you use Ford cars, you read their newsletter.
But forgive us if we operate as if you've already been killed and issue the updates by default. In the long term, it doesn't matter if you get killed today or tomorrow.
It was apparently 'too complicated' or something. Because parents are too lazy.
Sleep deprivation, and distraction while driving.
Everything else is statistical noise.
You mean you're more aligned with what they claim are their morals.
I think we can safely assume you are not aligned with the actual morals of the current leaders of the Republican party.
Proxy servers to block porn will block this mod exactly as well as they block porn.
And how the hell would a seven year old know the difference between the two modes: 'The car will move if you do obscure things with your hands and feet.' and 'The car will not move if you do obscure things with your hands and feet, because I have the keys.'?
Refusing to get in the seat at all is completely sane behavior.
If someone sat me in a 747 cockpit with all the lights on and said 'Why don't you push some buttons and pretend to fly us around a bit?', I'd refuse to touch anything, too, except maybe turn the wheel a bit. You, of course, would be fine because you'd magically know the landing gear button and throttle were disabled because we were in some sort of simulation mode...
The absolute best thing a person can ever know is when to not attempt to do something that might be dangerous. And it's almost always best to err on the side of caution. SomeoneGotMyNick's kid is way smarter than most seven year olds I know, and hopefully will continue to be as smart during the 'I AM INVINCIBLE!' stage that teenagers go through.
When you've tested a program and it works, you don't willynilly remove sections of code, graphics, and sounds.
You want to disable something, you just change a single test. Instead of 'if (a==2)', you make it 'if (a==-50)' or 'if (1==0)' or something.
In this case, as this was a specific minigame you had to earn, they just removed the stuff that let you earn it. Which didn't even require any code changes at all, just the removal of something from the map.
Somehow I get the idea that 99% of people here have never actually worked on a large programming project or know anything about the programming industry.
This is perfectly normal programming practices. Once you test something, you change it as little as possible. Almost every large program has extra parts laying around.
As the minigames probably have a standard way of saying 'You can get to this one', someone noticed there was a minigame that you could never earn, and flipped that bit on to see what the game was.
If Rockstar had been thinking, they would have filtered out that bit when loading the saved game files, thus requiring at least a program patch, but it wasn't some attempt to slip past the ratings, nor was it laziness. That's just how you program.
It's a hell of a lot better than spending months on testing and then, at least last second, diking out large sections of code because someone realized they couldn't get a M rating, which instead results in a M rated program that runs fine, except 30 minutes after you steal your fifteenth car, the game crashes.
We think the ratings are absurd too. We remember being 16, and we know damn well we could handle those games.
The thing is, if we don't have ratings, we'll have real censorship. So we all pretend the ratings are good.
We can say outloud 'Don't restrict what I can do because you can't control your kids' at the same time we're thinking 'Your kids are probably twice as smart as you and understand what's going on better than you do. And can download the games anyway.'.
Likewise we can complain about the hypocrisy of a game where you repeated commit violent felonies being rated M, but one where you control a full clothed person during sex supposedly being rated AO. (1) While at the same time, we can think 'Neither sex or violence in a game is really any problem at all.'.
In other words, don't blow the scam we've got going. Continue to download warez copies of GTA or get your unwitting parents to buy them. The point isn't to fix anything, it's to trick the people whining into shutting up or, at least, make them look like idiots when they talk about sex and violence in a game kids aren't supposed to have.
Come on. You know you're all thinking exactly like this.
1) Not saying that GTA should be rated AO, but everyone seems to be thinking that if minigame actually been in there, it would be AO.
There is a Creative Commons 'Public Domain Declaration', which is grouped and classified along with the various CC licenses so it's machine readable by the various things that read CC licenses. We're sorry if it somehow upsets you for a document to have an encoded way of saying it's in the public domain.
This declaration, obviously, functions identically to all other public domain declarations, and no one has ever claimed otherwise, except possibly some poor blogger somewhere who called it by the wrong name.
And, BTW, you haven't have to say 'Copyright' for the last two decades to get a copyright on something, you idiot.
It is fair use to quote someone in a discussion, especially if the quote is available in the same way as the original.
They didn't expect any compensation anyway, and had already implicitly granted permission to have that text copied every time that web page or usenet post showed up.
That has nothing to do with 'research' or 'education'.
However, it's legal to quote people anyway. If you're quoting something that's written down, more than likely you're either quoting a tiny fraction of the work, which is permissionable under fair use, or it was extremely small to start with and, thus not copyrightable.
Or, like with slashdot text, it was something that had no value to start with, and you already gave permission, by merely posting it, for slashdot to copy it millions of time. There may be a technical copyright violation, but absolutely no damages. (And you were copying it to comment on it, so you might even get in under fair use.)
And if you're quoting someone speaking, that's not copyrighted anyway. To be subject to a copyright, it has to be in a fixed medium, and sound waves are not a fixed medium.
Almost all discussions of 'copyright' in education are either aimed at teachers (Which have a whole host of issues to deal with.) or are aimed at students and are actually about plagiarism , which isn't illegal at all, just a damn stupid thing to do. It's nearly impossible for a student to commit a copyright violation in a paper.
Here it is.
Why, does it say it's a 'license' in anyway? Why no, it doesn't, because it's not. It's a dedication. It's a way to say you are placing something in the public domain. That is, in fact, the legal term for placing a non-expired copyrighted work in the public domain, you 'dedicate' it to the public domain.
It also add that, as far as you know, you own the copyright to the work, or it is already public domain, which is something copyright law requires in a dedication.
And that you know exactly what 'Public Domain' means, that you are giving up any rights to it you or your heir might have, which is not required by copyright law, but cuts down on the lawyers.
Yes, you can, in theory, say 'Copyright 2005 John Smith, released into the public domain'. But you'd be amazed how many people don't know what 'public domain' means.
Of course, as not all of them read slashdot, I'm at a loss as to how you think that's going to happen sans them updating and finding out why their scripts don't work.
Um, duh.
In fact, they should remove the old releases, and if they had a way to force users to upgrade, they should have used it. (Although, thankfully, they don't have that option, because that could be used for malicious purposes.)
And what the hell are you talking about, them not being open? Go and read about it if you want know about it. It's very clearly explained what's going on.
Of course, by your analogy, Tylenol shouldn't have removed its products from the shelves until a new shipment arrived. Some people might have been willing to take the risks, because they had a really bad headache, and heaven forbid Tylenol not allow people to harm themselves using Tylenol's products.
I find it astonishing that anyone can even pretend to complain about this updating automatically. I was about to complain about the fact it apparently wasn't, at least not before I removed it.
Instead of a 'foes' list, I think we need a 'stupid morons' list.
This is, instead, 'a vulnerability that DOES allow any website to read your hard drive'.
Pssst. Even after you whitelist the greasemonkey site, it still can't install a damn thing on your computer without you clicking 'Install'.
Greasemonkey 'adds' stuff to Javascript. Any page on the internet can use these additions.
If you have Greasemonkey installed, and Javascript enabled (Greasemonkey is rather pointless without Javascript anyway.), you are at risk.
You can't 'be safe' by only doing certain things, because the flaw is that any page on the internet can call Greasemonkey functions. (Any page that can use Javascript, at least.) It has nothing to do with you.
It is possible to use Greasemonkey with the NoScript extension to disable Javascript globally and then re-enable it only on a few trusted sites...but no one uses Greasemonkey on 'trusted' sites, we use(d) it to hack up stupid-ass pages that had eight square inch of content per page with the rest ads and fancy graphics.
If you absolutely require Greasemonkey to make some internal site work, and are willing to disable Javascript on the entire rest of the internet, NoScript might be worth a try. Otherwise, get rid of Greasemonkey, NOW.
If people are going to writing tricks in Javascript and installing them into Firefox, and they clearly are, than there needs to be a security context for that. In fact, it would be nice to be able to configure exactly what 'local' scripts could do, and restrict them, for example, from reading files outside of a certain directory.
And if goes without saying that scripts in web pages shouldn't be able to access local scripts, and probably safer for everyone if that went both ways.
I use an extension called NoScript, it disables Javascript by default, and I can turn it on per site, and even make it temporary. It can do that bar like you get when installing extensions or blocking popups, but I just keep the icon down in the status bar.
It's even better than the 'per-tab' control you can get with various buttons, because it not only remembers each site, but it lets you turn on, say, slashdot.org, and not 'falkag.net', which right now apparently has scripts on this page.
The problem is, unless I enable javascript on a page, the damn Greasemonkey scripts don't work on it either.
I forget how the ratings work, I have them completely turned off. But you might have something odd there.
The post I replied to said: 'she hadn't held that classification since 97 and was just a regular CIA employee.'
Which is, a very silly assertation, because you can't go from being a NOC to saying 'Oh, yeah, now I magically work for the CIA without any training or anything. That energy company I worked at? They let me go. But luckily the CIA had an ad in a newspaper asking for a desk job for analyzing intelligence, and...what do you mean, what experience do I have working in the intelligence field? Erm, I mean, I'll pick it up as I go along, I guess.'.
'What do you mean, how long have I really worked for the CIA?'