Given that this is EA we are talking about, I can definitely believe that they'd somehow manage to be paranoid about 'piracy' of a game they are giving away. However, since it's also an older game(pre "Origin" store/client/pox-on-humanity and originally distributed largely on retail disks) and being given away it would be unsurprising if as little effort as possible was put into modifications for the new distribution.
Does anybody know how deeply baked-in SecuROM has to be? Would the developer/publisher have a 'clean' version that is then put through some sort of SecuROM conversion step, or would you have to go further back, and deeper, into the development process to cleanly rip it out?
I'm baffled at why including it would be worth much (especially if the license agreement involves any sort of volume-based payment, which would likely wipe out any minor benefits in audience tracking); but if it is sufficiently difficult to rip out then it would be understandable why EA wouldn't bother doing so(aside from just being evil).
But admitting 'neurological changes' is tantamount to doubting free will, and we just can't have that! Despite any and all evidence to the contrary, it simply must be true that a 'will' or 'self control' exists independent of any squishy brainial biology, yet somehow capable of controlling its function. Never you mind that this makes little sense, or that fiddling with self control through experimental manipulation is practically a psych research hobby, this hypothesis is simply too intuitively attractive to deny!
Outside of DEA flunkies and hardcore suffering enthusiasts, I don't think that there's much support for skipping opiates(indeed, it is commonly held that pain is under-treated); but there is an awareness that prescription opiates are a fairly common introduction to opiate dependency, especially in populations that would otherwise have few introductions to them.
Unfortunately, we barely know how pain works, and really don't have many alternatives to work with. The painkillers that aren't addictive are mostly OTC junk that pain barely notices, and the ones that actually work are typically close relatives of quite addictive compounds. At least the pillheads get their fix manufactured under FDA quality control rules, which makes them safer than the junkies.
I vaguely remember some talk about an emulator at one point; but aside from that the two OSes have essentially zero in common. WebOS was (in my opinion) sadly underrated and died tragically young (I wouldn't be surprised if the situation has improved markedly; but back when 'Android tablet' meant 'Motorola Xoom running 3.0' it wasn't even fair how superior webOS was... Now that LG has it, it's probably gone to shit.); but it had absolutely no relation to palmOS, other than organizational.
The 'conduit' synchronization concept was pretty good as well (in an environment where 'eh, it's a computer, just give it TCP/IP and call it a day.' was not yet practical). The actual sync client, at least for Windows, was a total piece of shit; but conceptually the 'conduits' model was about the nicest flavor of PDA synchronization available before the rise of handhelds with their own data connections. PalmOS never handled those particularly neatly.
If you and everybody else responsible for the code running on the device aren't sloppy programmers, perhaps...
Even if your code is perfect, you still run the risk of having the other guy's program start scribbling over yours unless you feel like re-implementing absolutely everything whose behavior you don't entirely trust.
If it's just a screen connection issue, ADB/fastboot should be enough to wipe any internal storage good and hard.
If it's more broken than that, you'll have to go inside. If something has come loose that you can put back into place, you win. Otherwise, you can either pray for a friendly JTAG connection or physically destroy the flash chips.
I can only assume that 'failed to uncheck the checkbox' is exactly the sort of mutual agreement that contract law enjoys talking about the importance of, if not actually acting on it...
Unfortunately, the sense of energized hyperfocus is something that wanes as you develop a tolerance to them. They still improve focus and energy thereafter; but it's never that dramatic again. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if some people get into trouble by chasing that effect and moving to increasingly large doses. The low-dose oral amphetamines are pretty harmless (conveniently tested on children, for safety!); but once you hit the maximum dosage that a responsible doctor will prescribe any further attempts are likely to go increasingly badly...
I suspect that this conversation is a lost cause; but it's worth pointing out that that is one of the reasons why public health types get twitchy about prescription opiates.
Among those otherwise without access or interest in fairly serious drugs, an attempt at pain management following injury or illness can be a compelling introduction to the exciting world of stuff that's pretty close to heroin with better quality control. Not everyone develops a habit, of course; but it's an introduction that can happen regardless of circumstance.
Clearly our attempts to lead the commies out of the darkness and into the glories of the free market were not entirely successful. Surely a good, honest, American, defense contractor wouldn't even reply to an RFP for that kind of money, much less actually deliver, and comrade Putin wants a finished hack? The nerve...
I would certainly be (a lot) happier if medicine actually worked that way; but are there any examples of our successfully reverse-engineering a system as complex as we are robustly enough to make those sorts of determinations? I may be forgetting, or ignorant of, something; but I can't think of any aspect of science where we've taken on a problem of that scale without a whole lot of hacks, constants defined to make the numbers work out, simplifications, or just plain acknowledgement that we have the math to describe the problem but it is not computationally tractable for most real world targets.
Does the baseline healthy human enjoy targeted advertising, or does he really enjoy targeted advertising and find it to be an enriching aspect of his modern lifestyle?
The really depressing bit is not that they are drug tested(this part is depressing; but not really depressing); but that we currently don't have any drugs worth testing chess players for...
At least in more...muscular...pursuits team biology has done a sufficiently good job that there are plenty of actually performance enhancing drugs out there. For the mind we have some mediocre alertness aids and anti fatigue stuff that allow you to study a bit longer; but nothing nearly as dramatic as what you can do to muscle mass or blood oxygen transport if you aren't afraid of a few side effects and/or disqualification. It's a tragedy, really.
The (current, at any rate) lack of geographic identification probably hurts emotional engagement a bit. The more successful team sports have a nearly magical ability to grab the audience in some primitive part of their little hominid brain that used to handle inter-tribal combat and allow them to experience, by proxy, the emotional indulgence of victory or defeat against the away tribe. It's really pretty weird. Especially weird is how easily the affect of the game bleeds over into other things, like the traditional rioting and setting cars on fire, or the stock market...
Until they come up with a way of inspiring the same large-scale insanity in their audience, 'e-sports' are going to have a difficult time competing.
Really? This would be devastating? We can't live without electricity, electronics, water pumps? It's amazing we're here today!
Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.
Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.
Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.
How can you be so crass as to bring filthy, filthy, empiricism to a discussion about government?
Only people who lack faith in the a priori truths of Objectivism would be so base as to drag some nonsense about "what is actually happening" into the discussion. It's simply a fact that absolutely anything a government does is just a cover for expropriating the wealth creators and building a cadre of elitist bureaucrats to centrally mismanage things.
Does this have something to do with all the little advertisements that say CPAP and seem to have a mask crudely edited into a photograph?
I think that Newsmax, 'linkbait for reactionary old people', is behind much of that. They are ostensibly a political thing; but their advertising leans heavily into (sometimes rather dubious) tabloid medical reporting when there isn't a good red-meat issue to run banner ads about.
This seems like a sensible approach, I just hope that it isn't accompanied by a raft of broad and dubious patents that purport to cover pretty much any 'printing something to fit someone' application. That would both serve as ammunition against a broad range of printing applications and be unjustified given the things that have already been 3d printed for medical applications(usually on a small scale). If they have something more specific, covering programmatically generating customized deformable shapes for best fit, or some elegant manufacturing twist, that may well be all good; but it would be unfortunate to see something overbroad.
On the plus side, they might actually survive that. If memory serves aircraft helmets (while probably not as concerned with ballistics as infantry ones) are supposed to at least not endanger the pilot, and ideally to protect him, during fairly violent maneuvers like ejection.
That said, I wouldn't want to be the lucky guy who gets to find out.
Then I suggest you not enter any races in which the loser will die.
I would suggest that you give more thought to 'races' where outnumbering the opponent and firing anti-aircraft weapons at them from the ground is acceptable...
Even if we suspect that a nasty shooting war with a modern adversary is in the cards, it's a bit of a problem that our current next generation super plane costs so much that we'll necessarily have them in quite limited numbers and be unwilling and (in a conflict of any nontrivial size or duration) unable to expose them to serious risks.
This is especially bad if they turn out to be seriously vulnerable to any missile system developed that isn't ruinously expensive per shot or a closely held secret used only by somebody's elite guard. Obviously the cost of pilots means that the US isn't going to be doing many aerial human wave attacks (short of a WWII-style mobilization); but we certainly aren't going to be fielding larger air forces, or ones better able to resupply after losses, because our fancy aircraft cost north of $100 million a pop.
Slashdot Mirror
This EA: you only get StarForce if you pre-order at select retail partners or buy the launch-day DLC...
Given that this is EA we are talking about, I can definitely believe that they'd somehow manage to be paranoid about 'piracy' of a game they are giving away. However, since it's also an older game(pre "Origin" store/client/pox-on-humanity and originally distributed largely on retail disks) and being given away it would be unsurprising if as little effort as possible was put into modifications for the new distribution.
Does anybody know how deeply baked-in SecuROM has to be? Would the developer/publisher have a 'clean' version that is then put through some sort of SecuROM conversion step, or would you have to go further back, and deeper, into the development process to cleanly rip it out?
I'm baffled at why including it would be worth much (especially if the license agreement involves any sort of volume-based payment, which would likely wipe out any minor benefits in audience tracking); but if it is sufficiently difficult to rip out then it would be understandable why EA wouldn't bother doing so(aside from just being evil).
But admitting 'neurological changes' is tantamount to doubting free will, and we just can't have that! Despite any and all evidence to the contrary, it simply must be true that a 'will' or 'self control' exists independent of any squishy brainial biology, yet somehow capable of controlling its function. Never you mind that this makes little sense, or that fiddling with self control through experimental manipulation is practically a psych research hobby, this hypothesis is simply too intuitively attractive to deny!
Outside of DEA flunkies and hardcore suffering enthusiasts, I don't think that there's much support for skipping opiates(indeed, it is commonly held that pain is under-treated); but there is an awareness that prescription opiates are a fairly common introduction to opiate dependency, especially in populations that would otherwise have few introductions to them.
Unfortunately, we barely know how pain works, and really don't have many alternatives to work with. The painkillers that aren't addictive are mostly OTC junk that pain barely notices, and the ones that actually work are typically close relatives of quite addictive compounds. At least the pillheads get their fix manufactured under FDA quality control rules, which makes them safer than the junkies.
I vaguely remember some talk about an emulator at one point; but aside from that the two OSes have essentially zero in common. WebOS was (in my opinion) sadly underrated and died tragically young (I wouldn't be surprised if the situation has improved markedly; but back when 'Android tablet' meant 'Motorola Xoom running 3.0' it wasn't even fair how superior webOS was... Now that LG has it, it's probably gone to shit.); but it had absolutely no relation to palmOS, other than organizational.
The 'conduit' synchronization concept was pretty good as well (in an environment where 'eh, it's a computer, just give it TCP/IP and call it a day.' was not yet practical). The actual sync client, at least for Windows, was a total piece of shit; but conceptually the 'conduits' model was about the nicest flavor of PDA synchronization available before the rise of handhelds with their own data connections. PalmOS never handled those particularly neatly.
If you and everybody else responsible for the code running on the device aren't sloppy programmers, perhaps...
Even if your code is perfect, you still run the risk of having the other guy's program start scribbling over yours unless you feel like re-implementing absolutely everything whose behavior you don't entirely trust.
If it's just a screen connection issue, ADB/fastboot should be enough to wipe any internal storage good and hard.
If it's more broken than that, you'll have to go inside. If something has come loose that you can put back into place, you win. Otherwise, you can either pray for a friendly JTAG connection or physically destroy the flash chips.
I can only assume that 'failed to uncheck the checkbox' is exactly the sort of mutual agreement that contract law enjoys talking about the importance of, if not actually acting on it...
That would be nice. Unfortunately, while others can provide tips, only we can compromise our principles...
Unfortunately, the sense of energized hyperfocus is something that wanes as you develop a tolerance to them. They still improve focus and energy thereafter; but it's never that dramatic again. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if some people get into trouble by chasing that effect and moving to increasingly large doses. The low-dose oral amphetamines are pretty harmless (conveniently tested on children, for safety!); but once you hit the maximum dosage that a responsible doctor will prescribe any further attempts are likely to go increasingly badly...
I suspect that this conversation is a lost cause; but it's worth pointing out that that is one of the reasons why public health types get twitchy about prescription opiates.
Among those otherwise without access or interest in fairly serious drugs, an attempt at pain management following injury or illness can be a compelling introduction to the exciting world of stuff that's pretty close to heroin with better quality control. Not everyone develops a habit, of course; but it's an introduction that can happen regardless of circumstance.
Clearly our attempts to lead the commies out of the darkness and into the glories of the free market were not entirely successful. Surely a good, honest, American, defense contractor wouldn't even reply to an RFP for that kind of money, much less actually deliver, and comrade Putin wants a finished hack? The nerve...
I would certainly be (a lot) happier if medicine actually worked that way; but are there any examples of our successfully reverse-engineering a system as complex as we are robustly enough to make those sorts of determinations? I may be forgetting, or ignorant of, something; but I can't think of any aspect of science where we've taken on a problem of that scale without a whole lot of hacks, constants defined to make the numbers work out, simplifications, or just plain acknowledgement that we have the math to describe the problem but it is not computationally tractable for most real world targets.
Does the baseline healthy human enjoy targeted advertising, or does he really enjoy targeted advertising and find it to be an enriching aspect of his modern lifestyle?
The really depressing bit is not that they are drug tested(this part is depressing; but not really depressing); but that we currently don't have any drugs worth testing chess players for...
At least in more...muscular...pursuits team biology has done a sufficiently good job that there are plenty of actually performance enhancing drugs out there. For the mind we have some mediocre alertness aids and anti fatigue stuff that allow you to study a bit longer; but nothing nearly as dramatic as what you can do to muscle mass or blood oxygen transport if you aren't afraid of a few side effects and/or disqualification. It's a tragedy, really.
The (current, at any rate) lack of geographic identification probably hurts emotional engagement a bit. The more successful team sports have a nearly magical ability to grab the audience in some primitive part of their little hominid brain that used to handle inter-tribal combat and allow them to experience, by proxy, the emotional indulgence of victory or defeat against the away tribe. It's really pretty weird. Especially weird is how easily the affect of the game bleeds over into other things, like the traditional rioting and setting cars on fire, or the stock market...
Until they come up with a way of inspiring the same large-scale insanity in their audience, 'e-sports' are going to have a difficult time competing.
I'm not sure I want to live in a world where that statement doesn't imply sarcasm...
Really? This would be devastating? We can't live without electricity, electronics, water pumps? It's amazing we're here today!
Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.
Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.
Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.
How can you be so crass as to bring filthy, filthy, empiricism to a discussion about government?
Only people who lack faith in the a priori truths of Objectivism would be so base as to drag some nonsense about "what is actually happening" into the discussion. It's simply a fact that absolutely anything a government does is just a cover for expropriating the wealth creators and building a cadre of elitist bureaucrats to centrally mismanage things.
Does this have something to do with all the little advertisements that say CPAP and seem to have a mask crudely edited into a photograph?
I think that Newsmax, 'linkbait for reactionary old people', is behind much of that. They are ostensibly a political thing; but their advertising leans heavily into (sometimes rather dubious) tabloid medical reporting when there isn't a good red-meat issue to run banner ads about.
Only when we aren't trying to figure out why the planes keep asphyxiating them; but in theory, yes...
This seems like a sensible approach, I just hope that it isn't accompanied by a raft of broad and dubious patents that purport to cover pretty much any 'printing something to fit someone' application. That would both serve as ammunition against a broad range of printing applications and be unjustified given the things that have already been 3d printed for medical applications(usually on a small scale). If they have something more specific, covering programmatically generating customized deformable shapes for best fit, or some elegant manufacturing twist, that may well be all good; but it would be unfortunate to see something overbroad.
On the plus side, they might actually survive that. If memory serves aircraft helmets (while probably not as concerned with ballistics as infantry ones) are supposed to at least not endanger the pilot, and ideally to protect him, during fairly violent maneuvers like ejection.
That said, I wouldn't want to be the lucky guy who gets to find out.
Then I suggest you not enter any races in which the loser will die.
I would suggest that you give more thought to 'races' where outnumbering the opponent and firing anti-aircraft weapons at them from the ground is acceptable...
Even if we suspect that a nasty shooting war with a modern adversary is in the cards, it's a bit of a problem that our current next generation super plane costs so much that we'll necessarily have them in quite limited numbers and be unwilling and (in a conflict of any nontrivial size or duration) unable to expose them to serious risks.
This is especially bad if they turn out to be seriously vulnerable to any missile system developed that isn't ruinously expensive per shot or a closely held secret used only by somebody's elite guard. Obviously the cost of pilots means that the US isn't going to be doing many aerial human wave attacks (short of a WWII-style mobilization); but we certainly aren't going to be fielding larger air forces, or ones better able to resupply after losses, because our fancy aircraft cost north of $100 million a pop.