The same way laser-guided bombs aren't self-directed. I'm guessing here that the gun puts an IR laser dot on the target and the bullet homes in on that. Keep the dot on target and you should hit.
Not in intermittent driving conditions -- at least, not decade-old ABS systems. I can't speak for the newer ones.
I almost rear-ended someone two nights ago because, while I was braking, I went over a pothole and my ABS system kicked in. (I was doing about 20 mph, coming up behind someone stopped at a stop sign.) The extra stopping distance required when the ABS is going ate up -all- the distance I had planned to leave between myself and the car when stopping, but for maybe a centimeter or two, and put extra wear and tear on my nerves as I "shit, shit, shit!"ed my way to a stop. Without the ABS, I would have come to an uneventful, routine stop with about a yard between that guy's bumper and mine, even with the pothole taken into account.
But hey, at least my tires weren't locked up, am I right? %P
Bullshit. I sneeze. A lot. I have seasonal allergies for every freaking season. My eyes are closed for slightly longer than the usual blink when I do, but nowhere near 2-3 seconds -- call it 250 ms at worst. I've had machine-gun sneezes while driving on the highway and while driving in horrible traffic. It's never caused an accident. You should be following at -least- two seconds behind the person in front of you, and if they start slowing down, hey, you should too.
Of course, I also generally don't ride the ass of the person in front of me, and I pay attention not just to the vehicle ahead of me but the ones ahead of that one, and that probably has a lot to do with it, too.
That kind of public transport is -exceedingly rare- in the US, limited mostly to major metropolitan areas, and even then, not always.
Where I live, within 50 miles of NYC, A trip that would take you half an hour by car will generally take two to three hours by bus, particularly if you have to change routes, which you usually do. If you're lucky enough to live by a train station and your place of work is on that same line, then you're doing good -- if you have to change lines, though, you're just as screwed.
Actually, I'd disagree with that, partially. Granting permission to search your stuff is not permission to take your stuff, unless that stuff is illegal or involved in the commission of a crime. You've waived a portion of one right, not all of them.
Yes, but that stuff is, without evidence to the contrary, -my- stuff, and should thus be protected. It comes under the 'effects' part of 'persons, houses, papers, and effects.'
There's the kind where they arrest you, take your stuff because it's evidence, or involved in a crime, and then, because it's involved in a crime, after you're convicted, they keep it. This is entirely reasonable in most cases and is not the kind that most people who talk about Civil Forfeiture are actually talking about. For one thing, you're actually convicted before they get it for keeps.
Then there's the kind where a cop pulls you over, finds ten grand in an envelope under your seat, takes it because you -might- be using it to buy drugs (or you just sold a bunch), not that there's any evidence indicating that, files suit -against the money-, and keeps it. Or the kind where your kid sold pot from your house and they take your house the same way. This is the kind of civil forfeiture that people complain about when they talk about it. This is utter bullshit.
Actually, there aren't any laws -- at least in the majority of locales -- that forbid someone from building their own firearm. Such arms don't need serial numbers or background checks, but they can't be sold, or, I think, transferred.
FTDI, in generic electronics use, refers to an interface. (In fact, that's what the I at the end of FTDI stands for.) So an "FTDI chip" is different from an "FTDI(tm) Chip." Electronic interfaces are not patentable or copyrightable, AFAIK. The 'fake' FTDI chips don't necessarily represent themselves as FTDI(tm) Chips, and certainly don't use the same designs -- it's just that they take the same inputs and put out the same outputs. Misrepresenting your PID to a driver is not the same as counterfeiting -- it's breaking a USB(tm) rule, but if you're not a party to those rules, there's no legal onus to not do so. It's basically the same thing as an x86 compatable PC chip -- it may be made by AMD, but it'll accept the same inputs and spit out the same outputs from those inputs as an Intel chip, even though the internal architecture may be significantly different.
Apple has a reputation for 'just working'? Hell, among my circles, Apple has a reputation for Just Working Until It Stops Working Upon Which Time You Have To Ship The Goddamned Thing To The Manufacturer For Repair.
Kill a tree, make it useful. A good, properly bound manual beats the hell out of printing a pdf and having it loose or going to a website. Give me a sheaf of maps with cool illustrations and annotation. Give me things of actual value to playing the game not cute gimmicks like a set of dog tags for an FPS that then do nothing but look cool.
A-freaking-men. Homeworld was one of the last games that I bought that had a significant amount of dead tree in it; IIRC, not only did it have the usual tech-tree poster but a comprehensive instruction manual and a thick book on the setting. Plus, of course, the game was absofarkinglutely great.
Then you go out and buy a game, nowadays, and it's barely got anything in it. MOst of the box is air.
It doesn't matter what criteria he judges what sucks and what doesn't by, only that he lumps games into that category. Value is a subjective quality, not an objective one. If he hates 9/10s of the games he has played, well, then, for him, 90% of games *do* suck.
Were I to use your scientifically illiterate litmus test I would be making the claim that JPRGs flat out suck (100% of them in fact). I would not only be wrong as sales figures clearly demonstrate, I'd rick the ire of countless cosplay weenies and I simply do not want to do that
So? JRPGS -do- suck. At least, that's my opinion. I'd rather spend my time picking lice off of a chimp than playing a JRPG. I don't care who it would tick off, I'm not gonna pay money for one off the shelf....See? We're back to the whole 'value is a subjective thing'.
"All games should have *some* method of trivial protection to stop case 1 because it destroys sales."
Not necessarily. I know of several games -- Sword of the Stars, Sins of a Solar Empire -- that I or one of my friends pirated and which were passed around, along with peer pressure to buy the damned game if you kept playing it. I never would have bought either if that hadn't happened, but I wound up buying both.
There's an intrinsic problem with your stance: you're assuming that every pirated copy equals one lost sale. This certainly hasn't been established to any degree of certainty.
In reality, if they had to pay for it, a significant percentage of the people out there wouldn't buy the product anyway. The greatest amount of this type of piracy comes from people who don't have money to begin with. So, every person in this category cannot be considered a lost sale, so it can't be considered to have cost the publisher anything. On the other hand, people are still using and presumeably enjoying your product, so when they do have money, they may flip into the second group: those who download something and only buy it if they like it, and if it had replay value.
The latter group can't be considered as a lost sale either, for both the reasons above (they wouldn't buy it if they didn't get a chance to play it) and because a significant chunk of this group regularly goes out and buys the games.
When the law is not upheld honest people start to wonder why exactly they inconvenience themselves by following it.
It would be better to look at why the law is not being upheld, or why it is impossible to uphold. Generally this is because the law is either just unjust or completely unrealistic. (Like Prohibition, or the RIAA attacking people for downloading a couple of songs.)
Corruption occurs when the law is applied unequally. If a law is equally and roundly ignored by all, it's unjust to suddenly and inexplicably enforce it. If people with lots of money can get favorable judgements purely based on that amount of money -- whether you're buying judges, senators, or lawyer-hours -- the government is corrupt. (Like the RIAA and its scattergun lawsuits.)
I don't need to visit a developing country to experience corruption; I live in the US.:)
Access patterns would also give indications about things. You could probably figure out whether people were unemployed, working a job (and which shift), or students, just from the access patterns, with moderately high accuracy. You might even be able to tell what kind of job to some degree.
I think that he's talking more about for online play. I don't see the current popular schema as onerous. For example, there's the Starcraft version, where you don't get verified for offline play but you do get verified for online play; then there's the HL2 version, where you verify once for offline play and multiplayer is single-instance account-locked. Neither of these impose much on the consumer, other than he has to have at least a dial-up connection to play the game the first time. Additionally, many consumers like the HL2/steam version because they don't need the damned disks and don't need to keep CD keys safe.
On the other hand, the various disk-based copy protection systems are a goddamned nightmare. The less technically-savvy users can get utterly screwed when one of them doesn't like their hardware or software configuration, rootkits, etc -- and the hard-core user or pirate isn't even slowed down by them.
The intent does not matter. Any terms which could reasonably interpreted in multiple ways should be clearly spelt out in any contract. If Apple leaves a gaping loophole in its EULA like this, then it's its own damned fault. It pays its lawyers enough that they should be on the ball.
Saying that you can only use a product on Apple-Branded computers is similar to, say, Sony making a tape-deck and having part of its EULA state that you can only use Sony-branded tapes in it. It's completely indefensible and flies in the face of fair use.
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Extremely different.
The same way laser-guided bombs aren't self-directed. I'm guessing here that the gun puts an IR laser dot on the target and the bullet homes in on that. Keep the dot on target and you should hit.
I'm fairly sure that such gyrocopters qualify as ultralight aircraft, and thus require no license.
Not in intermittent driving conditions -- at least, not decade-old ABS systems. I can't speak for the newer ones.
I almost rear-ended someone two nights ago because, while I was braking, I went over a pothole and my ABS system kicked in. (I was doing about 20 mph, coming up behind someone stopped at a stop sign.) The extra stopping distance required when the ABS is going ate up -all- the distance I had planned to leave between myself and the car when stopping, but for maybe a centimeter or two, and put extra wear and tear on my nerves as I "shit, shit, shit!"ed my way to a stop. Without the ABS, I would have come to an uneventful, routine stop with about a yard between that guy's bumper and mine, even with the pothole taken into account.
But hey, at least my tires weren't locked up, am I right? %P
Bullshit. I sneeze. A lot. I have seasonal allergies for every freaking season. My eyes are closed for slightly longer than the usual blink when I do, but nowhere near 2-3 seconds -- call it 250 ms at worst. I've had machine-gun sneezes while driving on the highway and while driving in horrible traffic. It's never caused an accident. You should be following at -least- two seconds behind the person in front of you, and if they start slowing down, hey, you should too.
Of course, I also generally don't ride the ass of the person in front of me, and I pay attention not just to the vehicle ahead of me but the ones ahead of that one, and that probably has a lot to do with it, too.
That kind of public transport is -exceedingly rare- in the US, limited mostly to major metropolitan areas, and even then, not always.
Where I live, within 50 miles of NYC, A trip that would take you half an hour by car will generally take two to three hours by bus, particularly if you have to change routes, which you usually do. If you're lucky enough to live by a train station and your place of work is on that same line, then you're doing good -- if you have to change lines, though, you're just as screwed.
Actually, I'd disagree with that, partially. Granting permission to search your stuff is not permission to take your stuff, unless that stuff is illegal or involved in the commission of a crime. You've waived a portion of one right, not all of them.
Well, if you're referring to a iPhone or something similar, they need a warrant to access it, IIRC.
Yes, but that stuff is, without evidence to the contrary, -my- stuff, and should thus be protected. It comes under the 'effects' part of 'persons, houses, papers, and effects.'
There are two types of civil forfeiture:
There's the kind where they arrest you, take your stuff because it's evidence, or involved in a crime, and then, because it's involved in a crime, after you're convicted, they keep it. This is entirely reasonable in most cases and is not the kind that most people who talk about Civil Forfeiture are actually talking about. For one thing, you're actually convicted before they get it for keeps.
Then there's the kind where a cop pulls you over, finds ten grand in an envelope under your seat, takes it because you -might- be using it to buy drugs (or you just sold a bunch), not that there's any evidence indicating that, files suit -against the money-, and keeps it. Or the kind where your kid sold pot from your house and they take your house the same way. This is the kind of civil forfeiture that people complain about when they talk about it. This is utter bullshit.
Actually, there aren't any laws -- at least in the majority of locales -- that forbid someone from building their own firearm. Such arms don't need serial numbers or background checks, but they can't be sold, or, I think, transferred.
Incorrect.
FTDI, in generic electronics use, refers to an interface. (In fact, that's what the I at the end of FTDI stands for.) So an "FTDI chip" is different from an "FTDI(tm) Chip." Electronic interfaces are not patentable or copyrightable, AFAIK. The 'fake' FTDI chips don't necessarily represent themselves as FTDI(tm) Chips, and certainly don't use the same designs -- it's just that they take the same inputs and put out the same outputs. Misrepresenting your PID to a driver is not the same as counterfeiting -- it's breaking a USB(tm) rule, but if you're not a party to those rules, there's no legal onus to not do so. It's basically the same thing as an x86 compatable PC chip -- it may be made by AMD, but it'll accept the same inputs and spit out the same outputs from those inputs as an Intel chip, even though the internal architecture may be significantly different.
No, they're scientists, people who feel the need to perform a sort of rigorous stupidity in order to better quantify the world. So far, it's worked.
What use was the microscope except as a sort of toy when it was first invented? Sure, you can see really tiny things, but so what?
Apple has a reputation for 'just working'? Hell, among my circles, Apple has a reputation for Just Working Until It Stops Working Upon Which Time You Have To Ship The Goddamned Thing To The Manufacturer For Repair.
Kill a tree, make it useful. A good, properly bound manual beats the hell out of printing a pdf and having it loose or going to a website. Give me a sheaf of maps with cool illustrations and annotation. Give me things of actual value to playing the game not cute gimmicks like a set of dog tags for an FPS that then do nothing but look cool.
A-freaking-men. Homeworld was one of the last games that I bought that had a significant amount of dead tree in it; IIRC, not only did it have the usual tech-tree poster but a comprehensive instruction manual and a thick book on the setting. Plus, of course, the game was absofarkinglutely great.
Then you go out and buy a game, nowadays, and it's barely got anything in it. MOst of the box is air.
It doesn't matter what criteria he judges what sucks and what doesn't by, only that he lumps games into that category. Value is a subjective quality, not an objective one. If he hates 9/10s of the games he has played, well, then, for him, 90% of games *do* suck.
Were I to use your scientifically illiterate litmus test I would be making the claim that JPRGs flat out suck (100% of them in fact). I would not only be wrong as sales figures clearly demonstrate, I'd rick the ire of countless cosplay weenies and I simply do not want to do that
So? JRPGS -do- suck. At least, that's my opinion. I'd rather spend my time picking lice off of a chimp than playing a JRPG. I don't care who it would tick off, I'm not gonna pay money for one off the shelf. ...See? We're back to the whole 'value is a subjective thing'.
"All games should have *some* method of trivial protection to stop case 1 because it destroys sales."
Not necessarily. I know of several games -- Sword of the Stars, Sins of a Solar Empire -- that I or one of my friends pirated and which were passed around, along with peer pressure to buy the damned game if you kept playing it. I never would have bought either if that hadn't happened, but I wound up buying both.
The problem is when there just isn't enough value to extract to make you consider it to be worth your money.
There's an intrinsic problem with your stance: you're assuming that every pirated copy equals one lost sale. This certainly hasn't been established to any degree of certainty.
In reality, if they had to pay for it, a significant percentage of the people out there wouldn't buy the product anyway. The greatest amount of this type of piracy comes from people who don't have money to begin with. So, every person in this category cannot be considered a lost sale, so it can't be considered to have cost the publisher anything. On the other hand, people are still using and presumeably enjoying your product, so when they do have money, they may flip into the second group: those who download something and only buy it if they like it, and if it had replay value.
The latter group can't be considered as a lost sale either, for both the reasons above (they wouldn't buy it if they didn't get a chance to play it) and because a significant chunk of this group regularly goes out and buys the games.
When the law is not upheld honest people start to wonder why exactly they inconvenience themselves by following it.
It would be better to look at why the law is not being upheld, or why it is impossible to uphold. Generally this is because the law is either just unjust or completely unrealistic. (Like Prohibition, or the RIAA attacking people for downloading a couple of songs.)
Corruption occurs when the law is applied unequally. If a law is equally and roundly ignored by all, it's unjust to suddenly and inexplicably enforce it. If people with lots of money can get favorable judgements purely based on that amount of money -- whether you're buying judges, senators, or lawyer-hours -- the government is corrupt. (Like the RIAA and its scattergun lawsuits.)
I don't need to visit a developing country to experience corruption; I live in the US. :)
Access patterns would also give indications about things. You could probably figure out whether people were unemployed, working a job (and which shift), or students, just from the access patterns, with moderately high accuracy. You might even be able to tell what kind of job to some degree.
I think that he's talking more about for online play. I don't see the current popular schema as onerous. For example, there's the Starcraft version, where you don't get verified for offline play but you do get verified for online play; then there's the HL2 version, where you verify once for offline play and multiplayer is single-instance account-locked. Neither of these impose much on the consumer, other than he has to have at least a dial-up connection to play the game the first time. Additionally, many consumers like the HL2/steam version because they don't need the damned disks and don't need to keep CD keys safe.
On the other hand, the various disk-based copy protection systems are a goddamned nightmare. The less technically-savvy users can get utterly screwed when one of them doesn't like their hardware or software configuration, rootkits, etc -- and the hard-core user or pirate isn't even slowed down by them.
No, but they should've spelt it out in proper legalese.
That context is not explicitly clear from the excerpts of the EULA which have been posted.
The intent does not matter. Any terms which could reasonably interpreted in multiple ways should be clearly spelt out in any contract. If Apple leaves a gaping loophole in its EULA like this, then it's its own damned fault. It pays its lawyers enough that they should be on the ball.
Note: IANAL, and I've never read the EULA.
Saying that you can only use a product on Apple-Branded computers is similar to, say, Sony making a tape-deck and having part of its EULA state that you can only use Sony-branded tapes in it. It's completely indefensible and flies in the face of fair use.