Ubisoft has a reputation for that kind of stuff and hating pc gamers. They earned that reputation by their actions and statements. Somehow none of this is any kind of surprise.
Exactly. With their culture and policy of black box secrecy and the number of times they've been caught lying both to the public, as well as to their supposed bosses (congress, senate, president) is there anyone left dumb enough to believe anything they say?
We're talking about people trying to use hardware that they haven't been trained in, or hasn't been properly tested and debugged, or any of a million other issues for various reasons. It doesn't matter if you are talking alien telepathic brain scanners, or pen and paper, the bureaucrats and politicians will find a way to screw it up. They always have, and I am confidant that they will continue to do so as long as they have their fingers in the pie. It's not really an "electronic" issue, it's an idiot issue. And just to be clear, the idiot responsible is probably NOT the poor person stuck at the polling station getting yelled at.
Not too long ago I saw a job listing that required experience with various programs, one of which was five years, unfortunately that program had only been available for a bit less than 3 years.
A judge in one of the EU countries has already slapped down a "right to be forgotten" case trying to eliminate a bad review already. I believe he stated that the review was in the public interest and that was greater than the value to society of the subject being pissed over a bad review. (Or something like that. Not sure, but I think it was a German case. I'm not going to try and google it, but you can if you want.)
I've always heard that classical music is judged on two merits, both technical expertise, and how evocative it is played. A combination of hitting the right notes at the right time properly, and a personal touch that inspires emotional responses.
I'm not that discriminator (or anal) and put it into the category of how much I like it or not. It sounds to me like that reviewer was saying his technical skill is high, but his ability to inspire emotions is either lacking, or sometimes aimed at the wrong ones.
Heck, I'd be happy is someone said I could play an instrument well. (Will never happen, but still...);)
Sometimes you just know something is wrong, but have no idea how to realistically fix it. It sucks, but it happens a lot. Also, there is a difference between pointing out the issue so that hopefully someone with the resources and an idea how to fix it will actually get around to it if enough people yell loud enough, and whining. I suspect this was the former rather than the latter.;)
Not to mention, the whole "voting with your wallet" is completely useless. The most you'll get is a small bump in the numbers that the companies probably won't notice, and if they do notice, certainly won't attribute it to customer dissatisfaction with a corporate policy of using intrusive DRM.
Here's an idea, try telling the company directly and politely what your issue is. The best way is with an actual dead tree format old fashioned letter. Yes, a letter. Not email, not twitter, not even a phone call, but a letter. A letter has a physical form that isn't just deleted without reading if anyone even looked at it in the first place. It is also a physical record of the communication. A stack of a thousand letters holds a thousand times more weight than a thousand emails. It sucks, but it's true.
I'm all for activism, but please, try using something that won't get less attention than a gnat on the far side of the room.
Not that easy. I've bought games that made no declarations of DRM, and yet the bastards stealth installed really intrusive DRM that fucked up other things on my machine until they were identified and removed with extreme prejudice.
Non-intrusive DRM isn't that bad, like cd keys, and isn't worth the effort to remove. I reserve the removals for anything that annoys me or interferes with anything.
And yes, I'm glad there are people out there who crack everything and make the option available for the rest of us.
(Back when Baldur's Gate first came out, the DRM thrashed the drive and slowed things down so much, most of my friends couldn't even play, and we all had purchased full price commercial copies. I found a crack, that suddenly made the game about 5 times faster and made the thrashing disappear completely. The DRM was the issue. After a few months, the company released a patch that killed the DRM, and low and behold, the game became playable for everyone.)
I suspect the case we are talking about is a work published 1923 through 1963 with a copyright notice and the copyright was renewed1923 through 1963. That means it's 95 years after publication date.
Try this link for the full info: https://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
They did it intentionally by including code in their driver that doesn't actually function on their their chips, but will function on chips that actually follow instructions more accurately, which will brick the device by changing it's PID and causing it to have an invalid checksum. (Short summary from some hardware hackers that found the offending piece of code.)
Of course their is no way for an enduser to even know what chips are in their devices before purchasing, much less if they are alleged copyright violators.
Intentionally making the devices that belong to other people non-functional is destruction of private property. You can make a case that maybe they didn't have to make their driver work with the alleged violators, but no company has the right to destroy or otherwise impair them. They intentionally created destructive malware that punishes the end user. If they had tried legal means, like identifying the alleged counterfeit items and throwing rabid lawyers at the source of those chips, they would have been fine, but these morons decided to trash innocent peoples stuff.
It's like if you bought an awesome Hawaiian shirt, and then sent it to be dry-cleaned. Little did you know that the dry-cleaner was using a special cleaning solution sent to them by the maker of certain buttons used in many shirts, including yours. If the cleaner is exposed to buttons that aren't imbedded with the companies secret sauce but are of the same shape as the companies buttons, it causes them to burst into flames, destroying portions of your precious Hawaiian shirt, and anything in the pockets of the clothes you are actually wearing. Now, does that company have the right to destroy your stuff because you didn't know it might have an unauthorized button? NO Fing WAY!
Now stop trying to protect the malicious weasels that are too Fing lazy to sick lawyers and cops on the source of the counterfeits and instead decided to use malware to attack everyone that unknowingly got some.
There have been various studies where they have found that a large percentage of the lights where there are red light cams do not follow the state regulations and have yellow light times that are too short. You want me to link it for you, tough, go find it yourself, not that you ever will. The keyword rot and search engines ignoring boolean expressions makes it more of a pain than I care to look up something I've read years ago just because you are a doubting thomas too lazy to do it himself.
Even so, here's an interesting link I found with less than 10 seconds of searching about yellow lights being too short in Chicago, and most of that time was typing in the keywords. http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140812/river-north/city-yellow-lights-too-short-judge-says-before-tossing-red-light-tickets
Actually Pressor or Presser Beam is the standard sci-fi name for that, and has been for a very long time now. (I've usually seen the 1st spelling, though the second is used sometimes.)
Just because the founders were ignorant of the technological standards that would exist a couple of centuries later by no means indicates that they were excluding different formats from their rules. Hell, they didn't say cuneiform clay tablets, but you can damn well bet that they would have raised holy hell if someone were using that particular medium of recording information and some dumbass tried to snoop into them because they aren't made from dead trees.
The fact that it made it to the state supreme court means their lawyers weren't willing to give in until all possible means of making it go away were exhausted.
Agreed. However, it is unfortunate that the ones that should arrest them are the police, and the police won't arrest the police unless they have no choice. On top of that, at this current juncture they'll do the whole "but I thought it was legal" argument, and because they are police, it will be hand-waved away.
Slashdot Mirror
They have, honest.
Now they use their new ultra secret tracking brownies.
Ubisoft has a reputation for that kind of stuff and hating pc gamers.
They earned that reputation by their actions and statements.
Somehow none of this is any kind of surprise.
I wish they'd have posted pics taken of the shower from both ground probes and orbital ones.
Trawling is with nets, Trolling is with hook & lines.
Exactly. With their culture and policy of black box secrecy and the number of times they've been caught lying both to the public, as well as to their supposed bosses (congress, senate, president) is there anyone left dumb enough to believe anything they say?
We're talking about people trying to use hardware that they haven't been trained in, or hasn't been properly tested and debugged, or any of a million other issues for various reasons. It doesn't matter if you are talking alien telepathic brain scanners, or pen and paper, the bureaucrats and politicians will find a way to screw it up. They always have, and I am confidant that they will continue to do so as long as they have their fingers in the pie. It's not really an "electronic" issue, it's an idiot issue. And just to be clear, the idiot responsible is probably NOT the poor person stuck at the polling station getting yelled at.
Not too long ago I saw a job listing that required experience with various programs, one of which was five years, unfortunately that program had only been available for a bit less than 3 years.
A judge in one of the EU countries has already slapped down a "right to be forgotten" case trying to eliminate a bad review already. I believe he stated that the review was in the public interest and that was greater than the value to society of the subject being pissed over a bad review. (Or something like that. Not sure, but I think it was a German case. I'm not going to try and google it, but you can if you want.)
I'm sure he would have added alternate fonts if he could. :P
I would
I've always heard that classical music is judged on two merits, both technical expertise, and how evocative it is played.
;)
A combination of hitting the right notes at the right time properly, and a personal touch that inspires emotional responses.
I'm not that discriminator (or anal) and put it into the category of how much I like it or not.
It sounds to me like that reviewer was saying his technical skill is high, but his ability to inspire emotions is either lacking, or sometimes aimed at the wrong ones.
Heck, I'd be happy is someone said I could play an instrument well. (Will never happen, but still...)
Sometimes you just know something is wrong, but have no idea how to realistically fix it. It sucks, but it happens a lot. Also, there is a difference between pointing out the issue so that hopefully someone with the resources and an idea how to fix it will actually get around to it if enough people yell loud enough, and whining. ;)
I suspect this was the former rather than the latter.
Not to mention, the whole "voting with your wallet" is completely useless. The most you'll get is a small bump in the numbers that the companies probably won't notice, and if they do notice, certainly won't attribute it to customer dissatisfaction with a corporate policy of using intrusive DRM.
Here's an idea, try telling the company directly and politely what your issue is. The best way is with an actual dead tree format old fashioned letter. Yes, a letter. Not email, not twitter, not even a phone call, but a letter. A letter has a physical form that isn't just deleted without reading if anyone even looked at it in the first place. It is also a physical record of the communication. A stack of a thousand letters holds a thousand times more weight than a thousand emails. It sucks, but it's true.
I'm all for activism, but please, try using something that won't get less attention than a gnat on the far side of the room.
Wow, you really know so little about cracked DRMs and games. You might want to do a bit more than two and half minutes of research on the subject.
Not that easy. I've bought games that made no declarations of DRM, and yet the bastards stealth installed really intrusive DRM that fucked up other things on my machine until they were identified and removed with extreme prejudice.
Non-intrusive DRM isn't that bad, like cd keys, and isn't worth the effort to remove.
I reserve the removals for anything that annoys me or interferes with anything.
And yes, I'm glad there are people out there who crack everything and make the option available for the rest of us.
(Back when Baldur's Gate first came out, the DRM thrashed the drive and slowed things down so much, most of my friends couldn't even play, and we all had purchased full price commercial copies. I found a crack, that suddenly made the game about 5 times faster and made the thrashing disappear completely. The DRM was the issue. After a few months, the company released a patch that killed the DRM, and low and behold, the game became playable for everyone.)
Not true.
I suspect the case we are talking about is a work published 1923 through 1963 with a copyright notice and the copyright was renewed1923 through 1963.
That means it's 95 years after publication date.
Try this link for the full info:
https://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
So do many judges which is why so many artists over the years have been able to fight for the rights to their creations and won.
You beat me to the punch, I was going to say that. After all, Ham isn't exactly reputable.
I watched it as well, and I now suspect you are one of Hams astroturfers.
Politicians...
They did it intentionally by including code in their driver that doesn't actually function on their their chips, but will function on chips that actually follow instructions more accurately, which will brick the device by changing it's PID and causing it to have an invalid checksum. (Short summary from some hardware hackers that found the offending piece of code.)
Of course their is no way for an enduser to even know what chips are in their devices before purchasing, much less if they are alleged copyright violators.
Intentionally making the devices that belong to other people non-functional is destruction of private property. You can make a case that maybe they didn't have to make their driver work with the alleged violators, but no company has the right to destroy or otherwise impair them. They intentionally created destructive malware that punishes the end user. If they had tried legal means, like identifying the alleged counterfeit items and throwing rabid lawyers at the source of those chips, they would have been fine, but these morons decided to trash innocent peoples stuff.
It's like if you bought an awesome Hawaiian shirt, and then sent it to be dry-cleaned. Little did you know that the dry-cleaner was using a special cleaning solution sent to them by the maker of certain buttons used in many shirts, including yours. If the cleaner is exposed to buttons that aren't imbedded with the companies secret sauce but are of the same shape as the companies buttons, it causes them to burst into flames, destroying portions of your precious Hawaiian shirt, and anything in the pockets of the clothes you are actually wearing.
Now, does that company have the right to destroy your stuff because you didn't know it might have an unauthorized button? NO Fing WAY!
Now stop trying to protect the malicious weasels that are too Fing lazy to sick lawyers and cops on the source of the counterfeits and instead decided to use malware to attack everyone that unknowingly got some.
There have been various studies where they have found that a large percentage of the lights where there are red light cams do not follow the state regulations and have yellow light times that are too short.
You want me to link it for you, tough, go find it yourself, not that you ever will.
The keyword rot and search engines ignoring boolean expressions makes it more of a pain than I care to look up something I've read years ago just because you are a doubting thomas too lazy to do it himself.
Even so, here's an interesting link I found with less than 10 seconds of searching about yellow lights being too short in Chicago, and most of that time was typing in the keywords.
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140812/river-north/city-yellow-lights-too-short-judge-says-before-tossing-red-light-tickets
Enjoy.
Actually Pressor or Presser Beam is the standard sci-fi name for that, and has been for a very long time now.
(I've usually seen the 1st spelling, though the second is used sometimes.)
Just because the founders were ignorant of the technological standards that would exist a couple of centuries later by no means indicates that they were excluding different formats from their rules. Hell, they didn't say cuneiform clay tablets, but you can damn well bet that they would have raised holy hell if someone were using that particular medium of recording information and some dumbass tried to snoop into them because they aren't made from dead trees.
The fact that it made it to the state supreme court means their lawyers weren't willing to give in until all possible means of making it go away were exhausted.
Agreed. However, it is unfortunate that the ones that should arrest them are the police, and the police won't arrest the police unless they have no choice.
On top of that, at this current juncture they'll do the whole "but I thought it was legal" argument, and because they are police, it will be hand-waved away.