Hey look, we might have an actual example of someone being effected by the evil pornographic content in Bulletstorm leading to increased risk of sexual violence! =p
Some good points. Of course the "working productively 40 hours a week" simply doesn't happen, let alone the 50 hours/week I currently run, or the 58 hours/week I was doing recently.
At the same time, I don't think a 4 day work week is necessarily a good idea -- cutting overall hours without reducing overall pay isn't a terrible plan, but going about it through reducing hours/day rather than days/week seems like a more productive approach -- I know I am less productive my first and last hour here than I am at any other point during the day, in large part because I'm at the office before sunrise and don't leave until after 4:30PM. I get almost as much done per day on the rare occasions that this facility runs 8 hour shifts, and actually get more done per day when said 8 hour shifts don't start until after sunrise.
All that would take is an expansion of civil forfeiture, not even a huge one.
Civil forfeiture is a bad, bad thing, even in concept. It's kind of hard to argue that the government should be able to confiscate arbitrary sections of your personal wealth and then sue the property (not you but the property itself which being neither a citizen nor a person has less rights than you do) and claim ownership of such if they can demonstrate that it's more likely that this property was the proceeds of some crime than that it wasn't.
So yeah, they sue your possessions (which lack civil rights) and have a lower burden of proof since it's a civil case. Basically so that they can claim any wealth belonging to anyone accused of drug violations, and likely do so even if they are found innocent.
".....and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour....." - Bible, KJV translation.
Out of context, obviously (but appropriate since no context was given to the Qor'an quote either), but still. I always found it amusing that in return for following their divinely appointed religious leader and violating a law they hadn't received yet they get ordered to violate another law from the same set repeatedly.
Except I thought TrueCrypt hidden partitions worked like this:
You create an encrypted partition/disk image/whatever of a given size. You request it have a hidden partition, and that the hidden partition be some smaller size. TrueCrypt creates a partition of the larger size and hides the smaller one in the same space (but at the other end of the disk/file/partition/whatever).
So you have, for example, a 200GB TrueCrypt partition that contains a 160GB hidden TrueCrypt partition. Providing the password for the nonhidden partition shows you the 200GB partition, providing both shows you the 160GB hidden partition, and writing more than 40GB to the 200GB partition corrupts the hidden partition.
What would you be charging wikileaks with, and how does that not also involve shutting down at least a few papers stateside? Other than "on the internet", how does this really differ from things like the Pentagon Papers?
I had one of those for a different sierra game (they made one for basically all of them, and those hint books were the inspiration behind UHS (Universal Hint System) which was basically a windows app that read hint books with similar functionality.
The best hint book for King's Quest though was The King's Quest Companion. Look it up. =)
Big distinction -- they took the money from donators, and are refusing to pass it over the those whose account it was supplied to.
PayPal can certainly refuse to deal further business with this fund, that is their right. But they should be required to either release the funds collected to the legal fund, or refund it to all donators, such that said funds can be donated through alternative means.
They'd just receive their reasoning from the lobbyists themselves, written to sound authentic and convincing. If questioned about the content of such, they'd of course get it wrong, but not knowing things like that isn't seen as terribly wrong for politicians. I mean, next thing you know, you'll expect politicians to actually know the official duties of the office they are running for.
Then I retort simply -- how then can *you* tell the difference between an aimbotter/wallhacker and a skilled player? If it's not just an entirely subjective "he's too much better at it than I am", then shouldn't you be able to gauge some kind of metric to weed them out?
At the same time, shouldn't it be simple enough to publish an update to the game that includes some kind of anti-cheat code, rather than "I assume that the client is always right and completely honest at all times"? I thought "never trust the client" was the first rule of security for games like these?
So you are saying that the government is entitled to ban any books they desire from public libraries at a whim? After all, if they aren't barring the book from being sold whatsoever, then reader can supply their own access to the book in question, right?
When I was a teenager I afforded a "premium" (meaning sufficient for the current generation of gaming at that time) PC by buying comparatively cheap "used" parts (usually only 1-2 steps behind actual top of the line) from a schoolmate who was constantly upgrading his machine. I only found out after the fact (well after the fact, as in a couple of years later) that my source of cheap used but still good enough to be "premium" parts was, in fact, a fairly skilled thief who was selling off his previously stolen parts when he replaced them with slightly more recent stolen parts.
Back then I did a lot of piracy. Now, I have disposable income, am fairly sure that I am not receiving stolen property when I buy hardware (barring consoles, which I usually grab used from a pawn shop so I have no idea what their history is), and I generally buy games. The only times I pirate software are if it's either I can't find a non-pirate copy (if no one is willing to sell it to me than to TPB and abandonware sites I go) or if I have no idea how it will run o if I'll even potentially like it and there's no demo. These companies really need to go back to the old model of providing a demo that provides a reasonably clear glimpse of the game play.
So, in other words it's a specifically stated intended goal that should Steam go out of business that they will provide you access to a no-authentication-required version of your game library, however they can't promise to do that in perpetuity (since this would only come up in event of them going out of business) and for some particularly catastrophic versions of "out of business" they may not be able to do so at all, so the ToS only states that they *may* do so, without promising that they *will* do so.
I'm confused on the "deleting games without compensation" thing. Care to point that out in the license? Have they ever actually done this? Also, short of something like the Kindle/1984 scenario where Amazon was wrong to be selling it in the first place and was evading lawsuit, I can't think of even any similar scenario actually playing out from any company.
Or they have a "complete Collection" for some publisher at a ridiculous discount, but not any of the games individually discounted, so you grab "everything ever made by XXX" despite already having 4 of them and only wanting 2 of them, because the collection of 42 games was cheaper than buying those two at full price, and the extra 36 games you don't care about may end up having some gems in it. =p
Err, doesn't it also serve the obvious purpose of allowing the execution of homebrew without the need for a dongle attached at all times, as well as being necessary for CFWs, or am I thinking the wrong key?
Uhh, as far as the 3.55 stuff, geohot merely released a FW update that enabled the "install PKG from USB" feature in XMB and some signing tools. Both of those have very valid uses other than piracy, and neither enable piracy in and of themselves. That's like saying that releasing a hex editor or decompiler is illegal because you could use it to crack PC games.
Actually, geohot went so far as to warn people *not* to try making the changes that are necessary for backup managers to function because he had seen that 3.55 FW had some memory protection tricks in place that could brick your PS3 if you tried to patch the LV2 syscalls needed for backup managers (and thus easy piracy) all willy-nilly. I believe exactly what he said was something like "OMG OMG OMG OMG DO NOT PATCH LV2 OR YOU WILL BRICK YOUR CONSOLE" (I know I'm quoting the OMGs, at least -- the wording of the rest might be a little off).
So, FW patch that let's you install signed software from USB + signing tool to me does not = piracy, but rather any capability to run homebrew. Given the fact that he's never enabled any of the stuff necessary to make piracy simple, and outright states tat he's against piracy at every turn, I'm not sure how you get to your conclusion.
kmeaw, hermes, and KaKoRoTo however are the ones you should be looking at.
Actually, I think "psychic vampire" is the appropriate term. At least it was the term popularized by Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan -- though the term was originally coined in something like the 1930's it wasn't "widely" used before that.
If "free speech zones" are legal, then it's legal to cage people into a fixed area who want to protest a given event. So why not simply "free speech zone" WBC somewhere "out of sight, out of mind" from the mourners. Either that lets the funeral go on in peace, in which case everyone wins, or they successfully fight the legal battle and find "free speech zones" unconstitutional in a sufficiently high court, in which case everyone wins. I'm having trouble seeing a downside to this plan...
Anonymous isn't a rebel with too many causes. It's the infinite monkey approach to activism -- throw an infinite number of anons an infinite number of causes, and see which are lulzy enough to stick.
Not entirely true -- they also protest at the funerals of people who they feel are either homosexual or who "further the homosexual agenda" and have any notoriety whatsoever, assuming there's not a more convenient military funeral at the time. As well as select non-funeral things.
It's simple -- I argue that I cannot verify as Sony that the game you are attempting to play on my network is legit, and since it appears it my not be, I'm just going to disallow it, as it may be pirated or modified in some way. Please play your multiplayer games from the legitimate game media only, please.
Trust me, I know all about the "loads faster" position, it's why I've got my copy of Bayonetta cracked and running from the hard disk (dear god that game has horrific load times from disk). It's also why I rip my PSP games to memory card before I play them (that and playing them from memcard instead of UMD about doubles battery life). That doesn't mean that I need to let you use them on the network without being loaded from original media, though....and therein lies the core. If Sony were merely blocking you from running modified games or games not running from original media on PSN, that would be one thing, but they're going farther than that, much farther.
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Hey look, we might have an actual example of someone being effected by the evil pornographic content in Bulletstorm leading to increased risk of sexual violence! =p
Some good points. Of course the "working productively 40 hours a week" simply doesn't happen, let alone the 50 hours/week I currently run, or the 58 hours/week I was doing recently.
At the same time, I don't think a 4 day work week is necessarily a good idea -- cutting overall hours without reducing overall pay isn't a terrible plan, but going about it through reducing hours/day rather than days/week seems like a more productive approach -- I know I am less productive my first and last hour here than I am at any other point during the day, in large part because I'm at the office before sunrise and don't leave until after 4:30PM. I get almost as much done per day on the rare occasions that this facility runs 8 hour shifts, and actually get more done per day when said 8 hour shifts don't start until after sunrise.
All that would take is an expansion of civil forfeiture, not even a huge one.
Civil forfeiture is a bad, bad thing, even in concept. It's kind of hard to argue that the government should be able to confiscate arbitrary sections of your personal wealth and then sue the property (not you but the property itself which being neither a citizen nor a person has less rights than you do) and claim ownership of such if they can demonstrate that it's more likely that this property was the proceeds of some crime than that it wasn't.
So yeah, they sue your possessions (which lack civil rights) and have a lower burden of proof since it's a civil case. Basically so that they can claim any wealth belonging to anyone accused of drug violations, and likely do so even if they are found innocent.
".....and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour....." - Bible, KJV translation.
Out of context, obviously (but appropriate since no context was given to the Qor'an quote either), but still. I always found it amusing that in return for following their divinely appointed religious leader and violating a law they hadn't received yet they get ordered to violate another law from the same set repeatedly.
Except I thought TrueCrypt hidden partitions worked like this:
You create an encrypted partition/disk image/whatever of a given size.
You request it have a hidden partition, and that the hidden partition be some smaller size.
TrueCrypt creates a partition of the larger size and hides the smaller one in the same space (but at the other end of the disk/file/partition/whatever).
So you have, for example, a 200GB TrueCrypt partition that contains a 160GB hidden TrueCrypt partition. Providing the password for the nonhidden partition shows you the 200GB partition, providing both shows you the 160GB hidden partition, and writing more than 40GB to the 200GB partition corrupts the hidden partition.
What would you be charging wikileaks with, and how does that not also involve shutting down at least a few papers stateside? Other than "on the internet", how does this really differ from things like the Pentagon Papers?
I had one of those for a different sierra game (they made one for basically all of them, and those hint books were the inspiration behind UHS (Universal Hint System) which was basically a windows app that read hint books with similar functionality.
The best hint book for King's Quest though was The King's Quest Companion. Look it up. =)
Big distinction -- they took the money from donators, and are refusing to pass it over the those whose account it was supplied to.
PayPal can certainly refuse to deal further business with this fund, that is their right. But they should be required to either release the funds collected to the legal fund, or refund it to all donators, such that said funds can be donated through alternative means.
They'd just receive their reasoning from the lobbyists themselves, written to sound authentic and convincing. If questioned about the content of such, they'd of course get it wrong, but not knowing things like that isn't seen as terribly wrong for politicians. I mean, next thing you know, you'll expect politicians to actually know the official duties of the office they are running for.
Then I retort simply -- how then can *you* tell the difference between an aimbotter/wallhacker and a skilled player? If it's not just an entirely subjective "he's too much better at it than I am", then shouldn't you be able to gauge some kind of metric to weed them out?
At the same time, shouldn't it be simple enough to publish an update to the game that includes some kind of anti-cheat code, rather than "I assume that the client is always right and completely honest at all times"? I thought "never trust the client" was the first rule of security for games like these?
So you are saying that the government is entitled to ban any books they desire from public libraries at a whim? After all, if they aren't barring the book from being sold whatsoever, then reader can supply their own access to the book in question, right?
When I was a teenager I afforded a "premium" (meaning sufficient for the current generation of gaming at that time) PC by buying comparatively cheap "used" parts (usually only 1-2 steps behind actual top of the line) from a schoolmate who was constantly upgrading his machine. I only found out after the fact (well after the fact, as in a couple of years later) that my source of cheap used but still good enough to be "premium" parts was, in fact, a fairly skilled thief who was selling off his previously stolen parts when he replaced them with slightly more recent stolen parts.
Back then I did a lot of piracy. Now, I have disposable income, am fairly sure that I am not receiving stolen property when I buy hardware (barring consoles, which I usually grab used from a pawn shop so I have no idea what their history is), and I generally buy games. The only times I pirate software are if it's either I can't find a non-pirate copy (if no one is willing to sell it to me than to TPB and abandonware sites I go) or if I have no idea how it will run o if I'll even potentially like it and there's no demo. These companies really need to go back to the old model of providing a demo that provides a reasonably clear glimpse of the game play.
So, in other words it's a specifically stated intended goal that should Steam go out of business that they will provide you access to a no-authentication-required version of your game library, however they can't promise to do that in perpetuity (since this would only come up in event of them going out of business) and for some particularly catastrophic versions of "out of business" they may not be able to do so at all, so the ToS only states that they *may* do so, without promising that they *will* do so.
I'm confused on the "deleting games without compensation" thing. Care to point that out in the license? Have they ever actually done this? Also, short of something like the Kindle/1984 scenario where Amazon was wrong to be selling it in the first place and was evading lawsuit, I can't think of even any similar scenario actually playing out from any company.
Or they have a "complete Collection" for some publisher at a ridiculous discount, but not any of the games individually discounted, so you grab "everything ever made by XXX" despite already having 4 of them and only wanting 2 of them, because the collection of 42 games was cheaper than buying those two at full price, and the extra 36 games you don't care about may end up having some gems in it. =p
Also, if you link a non-Steam game in Steam, it will also work with the Steam overlay, on the offchance you use Steam's IM client.
Or more reasonably, that any new episodes would fit between the two, since it's implied that a lot of time passed between the series and the movie.
Err, doesn't it also serve the obvious purpose of allowing the execution of homebrew without the need for a dongle attached at all times, as well as being necessary for CFWs, or am I thinking the wrong key?
Uhh, as far as the 3.55 stuff, geohot merely released a FW update that enabled the "install PKG from USB" feature in XMB and some signing tools. Both of those have very valid uses other than piracy, and neither enable piracy in and of themselves. That's like saying that releasing a hex editor or decompiler is illegal because you could use it to crack PC games.
Actually, geohot went so far as to warn people *not* to try making the changes that are necessary for backup managers to function because he had seen that 3.55 FW had some memory protection tricks in place that could brick your PS3 if you tried to patch the LV2 syscalls needed for backup managers (and thus easy piracy) all willy-nilly. I believe exactly what he said was something like "OMG OMG OMG OMG DO NOT PATCH LV2 OR YOU WILL BRICK YOUR CONSOLE" (I know I'm quoting the OMGs, at least -- the wording of the rest might be a little off).
So, FW patch that let's you install signed software from USB + signing tool to me does not = piracy, but rather any capability to run homebrew. Given the fact that he's never enabled any of the stuff necessary to make piracy simple, and outright states tat he's against piracy at every turn, I'm not sure how you get to your conclusion.
kmeaw, hermes, and KaKoRoTo however are the ones you should be looking at.
Actually, I think "psychic vampire" is the appropriate term. At least it was the term popularized by Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan -- though the term was originally coined in something like the 1930's it wasn't "widely" used before that.
If "free speech zones" are legal, then it's legal to cage people into a fixed area who want to protest a given event. So why not simply "free speech zone" WBC somewhere "out of sight, out of mind" from the mourners. Either that lets the funeral go on in peace, in which case everyone wins, or they successfully fight the legal battle and find "free speech zones" unconstitutional in a sufficiently high court, in which case everyone wins. I'm having trouble seeing a downside to this plan...
Anonymous isn't a rebel with too many causes. It's the infinite monkey approach to activism -- throw an infinite number of anons an infinite number of causes, and see which are lulzy enough to stick.
Not entirely true -- they also protest at the funerals of people who they feel are either homosexual or who "further the homosexual agenda" and have any notoriety whatsoever, assuming there's not a more convenient military funeral at the time. As well as select non-funeral things.
See http://westborobaptistchurch.com/schedule.html
Wait, I thought the word that let you throw those out was "Terrorist"...or maybe "Pedophile"?
It's simple -- I argue that I cannot verify as Sony that the game you are attempting to play on my network is legit, and since it appears it my not be, I'm just going to disallow it, as it may be pirated or modified in some way. Please play your multiplayer games from the legitimate game media only, please.
Trust me, I know all about the "loads faster" position, it's why I've got my copy of Bayonetta cracked and running from the hard disk (dear god that game has horrific load times from disk). It's also why I rip my PSP games to memory card before I play them (that and playing them from memcard instead of UMD about doubles battery life). That doesn't mean that I need to let you use them on the network without being loaded from original media, though. ...and therein lies the core. If Sony were merely blocking you from running modified games or games not running from original media on PSN, that would be one thing, but they're going farther than that, much farther.
If we here, it would have been a dump truck full of lawyers, ala Sony v geohot.