... at least according to their CEO. In general, it does look like "most" of their games are DRM-free, but I was unable to find a clear statement about when and what. The example above is Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom, the DRM in question is Stardock's GOO.
I am currently only buying DRM-free games. I patronize GOG extensively, they explicitly state they never use DRM. The games are older, but they have many good ones, the prices are excellent, and... NO DRM. I'm very interested in Paradox, but want to be able to know - clearly and explicitly - which games lack DRM
Of what possible use would a 'camera' be in locating a stolen laptop? Would they be able to identify anything other than a room with 1 or two walls in the background? If they saw a face, would that bring them realistically any closer to an arrest?
There's at least one case where a stolen computer took photos of the new owner (presumably either the thief or someone complicit / unwitting downstream in the fencing process) and then automatically posted the images online. The photos show a clear image of the person's face, plus rather large tattoos on each arm. Additionally, Flickr provided the IP address the photos were posted from.
AFAICT these pictures were not terribly useful; I'm assuming that if the information led to recovery of the computer the owner would mention it in their blog. If so, it would imply that it's not simple to use webcam information to recover stolen hardware.
IANAL, but I RTFA, and I also read the linked settlement document. Am I correct in understanding that Katzer et. al. owe $100,000 plus legal costs? I know this has been a drawn-out battle, but that still seems like a fairly significant victory for Jacobsen et al.
I know of at least one case where a bystander was assaulted for calling 911 - Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was beaten with a tire iron at a state fair when he tried to call 911 after hearing a woman call for help.
I was once (late 90's) riding the MBTA in Boston around midnight. I was in the last car, sitting at the end, as were maybe three other teenagers. In the second to last car were about 5 other teenagers. They were yelling at each other through the glass. When we stopped at a platform, the larger group came into my car and started pounding on the smaller group. The T was generally pretty safe, so I was taken back by shock for a bit. I then pushed the little red button next to me and said (trying to be quiet but hoping I could still be heard) something like "Uh, I think you need to send some cops back here, there's a big fight." The conductor said (quite loudly) "We're aware of it, the police are on their way." I then waited for what seemed like a very long time wondering if I would ultimately be safer staying in the car or dashing out the door if big group finished little group and decided to head over to me.
Anyway, I made what I think was the right decision (even though it was likely irrelevant in providing any sort of aid), but I certainly didn't think it was without risk. Not sure what I think of the law.
Ok, lots of partially correct information in the above posts
First, start with Wikipedia. A prion is a self-replicating protein. It represents a misfolded form of a protein normally produced by the host organism. This misfolded form has the capability to 'template' its normally folded protein cousins into prions; this appears to happen when a prion binds/aggregates to the normal form, inducing a stable conformational change of the normal form to the prion state. Prions do not have to be in the brain, but the nastiest form (known) in humans causes brain degeneration in three known diseases - Kuru, where it is passed on by cannibalistic consumption of human brains; Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which occurs spontaneously very rarely, more often due to a pre-existing mutation in the PRNP gene that greatly increases the likelihood of a random misfolding event, and BSE where a cow prion is transmitted to humans, generally after eating meat contaminated with central nervous tissue from the cow.
Prions also exist in yeast. There are several characterized variants, some of which are beneficial to the "infected" host, such as "[allowing] growth on poor nitrogen sources" (see the table in the link). Yeast prions represent an important model in studying prion biology.
The blood-brain barrier does prevent antibodies from crossing into the brain. Otherwise, there would be nothing to prevent the body from recognizing prions as "wrong" - while the prion shares the same secondary (linear) structure as the normal protein, the tertiary (3-D) structure is distinct. Antibodies recognize tertiary sub-structures, so if they had access to circulating prions they could bind to them. Some comments above on prion stability; some prions do in fact appear to be highly stable (most researchers accept that BSE can still be transmitted in cooked meat). This may in part be due to the fact that the prion form in that disease (and CJD / Kuru - same protein) forms large aggregates. I don't know that it's reasonable to say that prions are somehow generally more stable than DNA, though. Proteases (proteins that cleave other proteins) have the potential to destroy prions, as do denaturing conditions (those that cause the unfolding of the tertiary structure to secondary, linear form) - yeast can be "cured" of most prions by treating with urea, which increases the unfolding rate and allows refolding to the 'normal' form.
I could not get it to run on Vista64, but my impression is the same; it allows you to write macros that target GUI components by fuzzy graphical matching of little screen shot snippets to what is currently on the screen. They provide an (unfortunately somewhat tedious) video demo that illustrates what it does.
It would be a boon for working with Lightroom, which has horrific keybindings; no way to rebind keys, and many common functions that have no keys at all (like red-eye reduction, where you must interact with a graphical element). I have been able to get around some of this with AutoHotKey, but I'd love to be able to bind a hotkey to a mouse click on a specific GUI component, regardless of it's current absolute x,y coordinate on my screen. That's exactly what Sikuli is supposed to do.
I really wish Adobe would co-opt the awesome dynamic key rebinding mechanism Gimp uses...
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Of COURSE there are people onsite. Most likely they have anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people onsite.
and as long as you're quiet and don't try to damage the control systems, you can move about freely and they'll generally ignore you
... at least according to their CEO. In general, it does look like "most" of their games are DRM-free, but I was unable to find a clear statement about when and what. The example above is Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom, the DRM in question is Stardock's GOO.
I am currently only buying DRM-free games. I patronize GOG extensively, they explicitly state they never use DRM. The games are older, but they have many good ones, the prices are excellent, and ... NO DRM. I'm very interested in Paradox, but want to be able to know - clearly and explicitly - which games lack DRM
Of what possible use would a 'camera' be in locating a stolen laptop? Would they be able to identify anything other than a room with 1 or two walls in the background? If they saw a face, would that bring them realistically any closer to an arrest?
There's at least one case where a stolen computer took photos of the new owner (presumably either the thief or someone complicit / unwitting downstream in the fencing process) and then automatically posted the images online. The photos show a clear image of the person's face, plus rather large tattoos on each arm. Additionally, Flickr provided the IP address the photos were posted from.
AFAICT these pictures were not terribly useful; I'm assuming that if the information led to recovery of the computer the owner would mention it in their blog. If so, it would imply that it's not simple to use webcam information to recover stolen hardware.
IANAL, but I RTFA, and I also read the linked settlement document. Am I correct in understanding that Katzer et. al. owe $100,000 plus legal costs? I know this has been a drawn-out battle, but that still seems like a fairly significant victory for Jacobsen et al.
I know of at least one case where a bystander was assaulted for calling 911 - Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was beaten with a tire iron at a state fair when he tried to call 911 after hearing a woman call for help.
I was once (late 90's) riding the MBTA in Boston around midnight. I was in the last car, sitting at the end, as were maybe three other teenagers. In the second to last car were about 5 other teenagers. They were yelling at each other through the glass. When we stopped at a platform, the larger group came into my car and started pounding on the smaller group. The T was generally pretty safe, so I was taken back by shock for a bit. I then pushed the little red button next to me and said (trying to be quiet but hoping I could still be heard) something like "Uh, I think you need to send some cops back here, there's a big fight." The conductor said (quite loudly) "We're aware of it, the police are on their way." I then waited for what seemed like a very long time wondering if I would ultimately be safer staying in the car or dashing out the door if big group finished little group and decided to head over to me.
Anyway, I made what I think was the right decision (even though it was likely irrelevant in providing any sort of aid), but I certainly didn't think it was without risk. Not sure what I think of the law.
Ok, lots of partially correct information in the above posts
First, start with Wikipedia. A prion is a self-replicating protein. It represents a misfolded form of a protein normally produced by the host organism. This misfolded form has the capability to 'template' its normally folded protein cousins into prions; this appears to happen when a prion binds /aggregates to the normal form, inducing a stable conformational change of the normal form to the prion state. Prions do not have to be in the brain, but the nastiest form (known) in humans causes brain degeneration in three known diseases - Kuru, where it is passed on by cannibalistic consumption of human brains; Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which occurs spontaneously very rarely, more often due to a pre-existing mutation in the PRNP gene that greatly increases the likelihood of a random misfolding event, and BSE where a cow prion is transmitted to humans, generally after eating meat contaminated with central nervous tissue from the cow.
Prions also exist in yeast. There are several characterized variants, some of which are beneficial to the "infected" host, such as "[allowing] growth on poor nitrogen sources" (see the table in the link). Yeast prions represent an important model in studying prion biology.
The blood-brain barrier does prevent antibodies from crossing into the brain. Otherwise, there would be nothing to prevent the body from recognizing prions as "wrong" - while the prion shares the same secondary (linear) structure as the normal protein, the tertiary (3-D) structure is distinct. Antibodies recognize tertiary sub-structures, so if they had access to circulating prions they could bind to them. Some comments above on prion stability; some prions do in fact appear to be highly stable (most researchers accept that BSE can still be transmitted in cooked meat). This may in part be due to the fact that the prion form in that disease (and CJD / Kuru - same protein) forms large aggregates. I don't know that it's reasonable to say that prions are somehow generally more stable than DNA, though. Proteases (proteins that cleave other proteins) have the potential to destroy prions, as do denaturing conditions (those that cause the unfolding of the tertiary structure to secondary, linear form) - yeast can be "cured" of most prions by treating with urea, which increases the unfolding rate and allows refolding to the 'normal' form.
I could not get it to run on Vista64, but my impression is the same; it allows you to write macros that target GUI components by fuzzy graphical matching of little screen shot snippets to what is currently on the screen. They provide an (unfortunately somewhat tedious) video demo that illustrates what it does.
It would be a boon for working with Lightroom, which has horrific keybindings; no way to rebind keys, and many common functions that have no keys at all (like red-eye reduction, where you must interact with a graphical element). I have been able to get around some of this with AutoHotKey, but I'd love to be able to bind a hotkey to a mouse click on a specific GUI component, regardless of it's current absolute x,y coordinate on my screen. That's exactly what Sikuli is supposed to do.
I really wish Adobe would co-opt the awesome dynamic key rebinding mechanism Gimp uses ...