Luck can open a window, but it can't make you successful.
No, but a lack of luck can make you unsuccessful, even if you do everything else right.
Of course it also depends on your definition of success. If you define it as "haven't gone out of business," then your bar is a lot lower and luck plays a much smaller part. If you define it as "known and used worldwide," then luck becomes a huge factor.
That said, its absolutely true that you can take your lucky break and blow it. No question about that. But all the sweat and hard work in the world won't usually give you that lucky break in the first place. You can't waste your lottery winnings if you never win the lottery.
The PR boost might do it. You have to realize that 99% of people would NEVER move their profiles anyway, even if that was a thing.
And since it would almost certainly require specialized server-side software, you could always just retain control over that and at the very least you'd be collecting licensing fees. So the server side would need to be made open (or at least the protocol open enough that the server side could be reverse engineered) in order to have any sort of true freedom.
A potentially bigger issue though is even if I'm willing to move my profile after stricthost.com shuts it down, I'm still relying on stricthost.com allowing me to grab a copy of my profile to move off somewhere else. Its not as simple as just "changing providers." In order to 100% guarantee that my profile will never be censored, I would need to host it myself.
Which leads into a more BitTorrent like protocol where each user is effectively also a host. That raises its own set of issues though -- making it not annoying for me to update my profile from 6 different devices. Having my profile still accessible when I shut off my computer for the night. And so on.
And yes, as someone earlier in the comments mentioned, preventing such a system from just becoming another MySpace-like failure (where commercial entities drown out actual users) would be nearly impossible.. pretty much by design.
So yeah, there's not really any easy answer here. There are far more angles to consider than just censorship. I believe that most of them would be fixable but in order to get a fully functional distributed system, you'd need to fix them all pretty much simultaneously (and THEN go out and find a critical mass of users to make your system worth using at all..)
CP laws aren't about offensiveness -- there's plenty of porn that's just as offensive or even more so that's perfectly legal.
CP laws are about theoretically protecting children. I say theoretically because most of them tend to be based on outdated or outright discredited theories of psychology.
While the same concepts (flawed or not) could in principle be applied to depictions of murder, the "think of the children!" cry means that we tend come down harder on CP than pretty much any other crime, regardless of whether its justified.
You can't sentence people for drawing and using a paper and pen, whatever the content of their drawing, or fapping it out to imaginary drawings that have no relation to any real person.
Apparently you can.
Keep in mind that for all the pretty words in the US bill of rights, a person has pretty much no "inalienable" rights. Rights are granted by those who have power over you, they are not intrinsic to your existence as a human being.
The closest one to inalienable is the pursuit of happiness, because we humans are surprisingly good at making the best out of any situation no matter how dire.
Should Australia also ban many Renaissance statues and artworks
Pretty much all laws of this nature give a pass to artful works. Of course "art" is subjective, but generally speaking if its been considered a masterpiece for hundreds or thousands of years, it probably falls under the "art" category.
For a definition more applicable to modern art: How likely would it be for a curator to include your artwork in a gallery? (Or something of similar content to your artwork -- presumably most artists of any brand won't get to be in a gallery.)
If you rank close to the "highly likely" then you've probably got a decent argument should it ever come to a court case. On the other hand, if you're just making smut, you'd be hard pressed to suggest that any art gallery in the world would even consider your work.
Its still subjective of course (every curator's going to be different of course) but you could consider it an expert opinion in a sense.
Values and actions are not the same thing. There's a huge difference between a racist who's just a bit of a dick, and a racist who actively goes out beating people up for no reason beyond the color of their skin. Its the same difference as "I wish my boss would die" and actually going out and killing her.
Similarly there's a difference between the country that makes some bad laws (ie: every country) and the country that outright abuses their citizens as general policy.
So, if the invention claims "A+B+C" and one piece of art teaches A+B and the the other teaches C, then A+B+C is obvious. That's not very subjective at all.
I disagree here. Sometimes the non-obvious part is that C can be combined with A+B in a useful manner in the first place.
New chemistry is more likely than new physics if cold fusion ever becomes a reality -- ie: some particle or molecule that acts as a catalyst to some form of fusion reaction. The article mentions muons as one such particle (albeit a rather impractical one as muons aren't particularly easy to come by either.)
Following some of the links in the article is some guy who claims to have created cold fusion of nickle. Its almost certainly a sham (and the links were breaking down in detail their reasoning for believing it to be a sham) but it at the very least points out that there are more paths to explore than the basic D+T fusion that we mostly hear about.
Really, do what you're comfortable with. The license is for you to write however you like it. If they come back and say "nope we won't hire you without a full patent transfer" then its again, your decision whether you're comfortable with that or not. You can always say no, or negotiate further.
One thing to be absolutely sure of though: Get it all in writing, and have a lawyer review it if you consider your IP worth anything in the first place. Nothing would suck worse than signing a perfect agreement only to discover a year later that there was a loophole you'd overlooked and now you're out on your ass.
Not really. While there's certainly no shortage of fossil fuel power stations, there are also many other technologies (solar, wind, nuclear if we can ever get over the paranoia, etc.)
Purely solar powered cars aren't really viable.. you can't guarantee enough sun at exactly when you need it and if you're going to stick in batteries and make it electric anyway, you may as well just move the solar panels off to a more efficient farm.
Wind of course is entirely irrelevant on a car. Much as it would be awesome to see a fleet of cars with giant sails on their roofs, its not particularly practical in the real world.
Nuclear cars are.. not impossible.. but I don't know how practical it would be to build a nuclear cell both small enough and safe enough to put in a car at the same time.
Things like hydro, geothermal, tidal, etc power generation of course don't work on a car since they require specific terrain features to operate.
So yeah, moving to electric vehicles won't kill the oil and gas industry, but it gives us a lot more than one option as a base fuel source. It will however HURT the oil and gas industry so of course they'll fight it tooth and nail for as long as they can, but its a losing battle (at the very least the whole peak oil and eventual production decline is very real even if it has kind of dropped out of the news in the last couple years with the introduction of fracking and new oil field finds.. but we know with 100% certainty that the world is not generating new oil at anywhere close to the rate we're consuming it so eventually it WILL come to pass no matter how long we manage to put it off.)
Keep in mind that there are safety issues involved as well when you're talking about amps on that scale, so even disregarding the weight, this would probably not be a wall-socket style plugin.
Imagine an overhead wire system like you see with many rapid transit and electric bus systems. Or perhaps underneath the car for aesthetic reasons. It would need some sort of initiator that's very difficult to operate manually which would expose (or at least activate) the electrodes. Obviously it would need to be operable by technicians for repair purposes and such, but presumably they'd be trained to not fuck around with high voltage equipment.
So basically you drive in, pay your $$$ and then sit back and wait -- no cables or hoses or whatever. I guess it would need to be a 3 stage system for commercial viability: 1) Car activates initiator. 2) Initiator activates payment terminal. 3) Successful payment activates electrodes.
I don't know how well that would work out in practice of course.. just trying to illustrate that our current method of a cable with a plug on the end that the driver manually has to attach to her vehicle isn't necessarily the only option.
This is easy to short-circuit. If you make the user pick 4 random words, then just exclude "is", "the", "are", etc from the count (but NOT from the phrase.)
So "This is a fairly long phrase" = 4 words, and "bebop camera total banana" also = 4 words.
There will still be certain phrases that will be more common than others of course across a large enough population sample, but discounting the "connector" words allows the user to generate a passphrase that's still grammatically correct and easy to remember for a person but leaves the Bayesian analysis and similar in the dust. (In the example, while the first is probably still a bit easier for the analysis thanks to being grammatically correct, its still 6 "real" words instead of 4 to analyze, essentially adding an entire extra word each to compensate for "is" following "this" frequently and "a" being an extremely common word in general.)
I don't know about their policies specifically, but its usually done so that if someone gets a hold of a password file and manages to break a few passwords, hopefully they'll have changed by the time the attacker tries to actually make use of them.
Of course these practices started way back before things like shadow password files and the such making it MUCH harder to obtain an entire password file without already having broken in anyway.
I don't know how much of an argument there still is for these kind of password rotations, especially when compared against the risk of a post-it note failure or a lost smartphone.
Actually, IP laws are an imposition of a market (the "free" qualifier is up for grabs) on an intangible. Without IP laws, there is no market at all as everyone would just copy everything for $0 (or very close to it. The physical media itself would still represent a market but that's too cheap to be self-sustaining.)
I fail to see how IP laws have anything to do with real wages or the environment (generally speaking.. a patent on a new windmill tech or such notwithstanding.)
you would need explicit permission to visit a random page prior to visiting said page
Sort of. You typically have permission but you have to assume it implicitly. Being made available (by the copyright owner!) on a public forum is generally a good indication of permission to view (which is not the same as permission to copy, deface, whatever.) Not a guarantee though. There are private websites out there (of course any smart private website will be locked behind technical barriers because legal barriers don't do much unless/until you're able to take someone to court.)
A music track on the other hand is (usually) NOT posted to a public forum.. or at least not by the copyright owner. If they have an inline listening applet on their website then you are most likely granted permission to listen to the song on their website. That does not grant you permission to download the song. If they have a "download this song!" button then you're most likely granted permission to download the song. But similarly, that doesn't imply you have permission to re-post the song elsewhere.
What a publisher decides to do with their copyright is not an all-or-nothing "it exists or it doesn't." You can be granted any number of various permissions. You are implicitly denied any permissions you aren't granted. Most professional websites will likely explicitly enumerate your permissions in a ToS somewhere just to avoid any legal argument of what constitutes an implicit permission.
99% of the time, common sense will tell you what's permitted just by the context. That might not be a strong enough argument for a court, but not being boneheaded and/or stubborn is a good start to not breaking copyright law. For the most part its pretty obvious when you're intentionally ripping off someone else's work, no matter what you say to justify it to yourself. (Though I am no way implying that current copyright law isn't boneheaded itself!)
Ugh. Ribbons. I still can't find 90% of what I want on those stupid things what.. 4+ years after they were introduced? And MS keeps adding them to more and more programs.
They took out the one major advantage of the start menu over metro -- not having to hide whatever else you're doing behind an ugly full screen monstrosity.
I'm guessing they noticed the start menu usage drop right after they made pinning to the task bar easy enough -- that covers probably 80-90% usage for most people if they pin the right programs.
What's amazing is that they thought the start menu lost its worth just because it lost much of its usage.
The win8 start page ended up being more of a glorified taskbar than a glorified start menu, both due to the unintuitive search interface (no indication that you should just start typing -- and the actual search icon is a different search of course) and the flattened folder structure (ie: if a program installs 14 icons into MyCompany\MyProgram under the old start menu, it now is 14 icons pasted directly onto your start page in amongst the icons from every other program you've installed.)
Navigating the win7 Start menu was relatively easy and intuitive. Navigating the win8 start page is pretty much the opposite of that. Its only really "easy" if the only things you ever use are the preinstalled software/icons/links (since its also reasonably unintuitive how to organize the start page. Not that the old start menu was much better for that but the existence of the folder structure tended to keep it from getting so cluttered that you absolutely needed to organize it given that it wasn't something you had to search through too often usually.)
Basically, it sounds mostly like they looked at the raw numbers and made a decision without bothering to check the cause of the usage drop (and more importantly, whether the remaining use cases were still relevant.) You would think the countless amount of bitching from the first day of the announcement forward (and who knows how much internal bitching by their own staff who would almost certainly have been subjected to it first) would have tipped them off but I guess not. Oh well, at least they seem to have learned their lesson for the moment.
The trick of course is knowing whether there's a secondary channel that they use to send the PII and associated hash that they wouldn't generally provide to anyone except say the NSA.
Of course a packet sniffer would find that out easily enough, and I'm guessing that someone would have already done so and let the world know if that was the case (and thus its probably not,) but simply being anonymized in the data you have doesn't directly imply that there isn't additional data somewhere capable of de-anonymizing it.
I'm thinking more subtle corruptions than "nothing works." Silently putting in Mar.1 instead of Feb.29 on a leap year because of some bad math and nobody noticed until November when the accountant starts reviewing for your end of year. If you just look at the dashboard, it will only reflect what's in the database. On the other hand if you go back and pull the Feb.29 and Mar.1 reports, you (may) be able to distinguish the data from each day in order to manually correct the records.
I'm a little stumped at how food and water could ever not benefit someone? Maybe if you have a really bad allergy? If you're acting out the gluttony scene from Se7en? Or conversely, how a lack of food could ever benefit someone.
Slashdot Mirror
Luck can open a window, but it can't make you successful.
No, but a lack of luck can make you unsuccessful, even if you do everything else right.
Of course it also depends on your definition of success. If you define it as "haven't gone out of business," then your bar is a lot lower and luck plays a much smaller part. If you define it as "known and used worldwide," then luck becomes a huge factor.
That said, its absolutely true that you can take your lucky break and blow it. No question about that. But all the sweat and hard work in the world won't usually give you that lucky break in the first place. You can't waste your lottery winnings if you never win the lottery.
The PR boost might do it. You have to realize that 99% of people would NEVER move their profiles anyway, even if that was a thing.
And since it would almost certainly require specialized server-side software, you could always just retain control over that and at the very least you'd be collecting licensing fees. So the server side would need to be made open (or at least the protocol open enough that the server side could be reverse engineered) in order to have any sort of true freedom.
A potentially bigger issue though is even if I'm willing to move my profile after stricthost.com shuts it down, I'm still relying on stricthost.com allowing me to grab a copy of my profile to move off somewhere else. Its not as simple as just "changing providers." In order to 100% guarantee that my profile will never be censored, I would need to host it myself.
Which leads into a more BitTorrent like protocol where each user is effectively also a host. That raises its own set of issues though -- making it not annoying for me to update my profile from 6 different devices. Having my profile still accessible when I shut off my computer for the night. And so on.
And yes, as someone earlier in the comments mentioned, preventing such a system from just becoming another MySpace-like failure (where commercial entities drown out actual users) would be nearly impossible.. pretty much by design.
So yeah, there's not really any easy answer here. There are far more angles to consider than just censorship. I believe that most of them would be fixable but in order to get a fully functional distributed system, you'd need to fix them all pretty much simultaneously (and THEN go out and find a critical mass of users to make your system worth using at all..)
CP laws aren't about offensiveness -- there's plenty of porn that's just as offensive or even more so that's perfectly legal.
CP laws are about theoretically protecting children. I say theoretically because most of them tend to be based on outdated or outright discredited theories of psychology.
While the same concepts (flawed or not) could in principle be applied to depictions of murder, the "think of the children!" cry means that we tend come down harder on CP than pretty much any other crime, regardless of whether its justified.
You can't sentence people for drawing and using a paper and pen, whatever the content of their drawing, or fapping it out to imaginary drawings that have no relation to any real person.
Apparently you can.
Keep in mind that for all the pretty words in the US bill of rights, a person has pretty much no "inalienable" rights. Rights are granted by those who have power over you, they are not intrinsic to your existence as a human being.
The closest one to inalienable is the pursuit of happiness, because we humans are surprisingly good at making the best out of any situation no matter how dire.
Should Australia also ban many Renaissance statues and artworks
Pretty much all laws of this nature give a pass to artful works. Of course "art" is subjective, but generally speaking if its been considered a masterpiece for hundreds or thousands of years, it probably falls under the "art" category.
For a definition more applicable to modern art: How likely would it be for a curator to include your artwork in a gallery? (Or something of similar content to your artwork -- presumably most artists of any brand won't get to be in a gallery.)
If you rank close to the "highly likely" then you've probably got a decent argument should it ever come to a court case. On the other hand, if you're just making smut, you'd be hard pressed to suggest that any art gallery in the world would even consider your work.
Its still subjective of course (every curator's going to be different of course) but you could consider it an expert opinion in a sense.
Values and actions are not the same thing. There's a huge difference between a racist who's just a bit of a dick, and a racist who actively goes out beating people up for no reason beyond the color of their skin. Its the same difference as "I wish my boss would die" and actually going out and killing her.
Similarly there's a difference between the country that makes some bad laws (ie: every country) and the country that outright abuses their citizens as general policy.
So, if the invention claims "A+B+C" and one piece of art teaches A+B and the the other teaches C, then A+B+C is obvious. That's not very subjective at all.
I disagree here. Sometimes the non-obvious part is that C can be combined with A+B in a useful manner in the first place.
New chemistry is more likely than new physics if cold fusion ever becomes a reality -- ie: some particle or molecule that acts as a catalyst to some form of fusion reaction. The article mentions muons as one such particle (albeit a rather impractical one as muons aren't particularly easy to come by either.)
Following some of the links in the article is some guy who claims to have created cold fusion of nickle. Its almost certainly a sham (and the links were breaking down in detail their reasoning for believing it to be a sham) but it at the very least points out that there are more paths to explore than the basic D+T fusion that we mostly hear about.
Really, do what you're comfortable with. The license is for you to write however you like it. If they come back and say "nope we won't hire you without a full patent transfer" then its again, your decision whether you're comfortable with that or not. You can always say no, or negotiate further.
One thing to be absolutely sure of though: Get it all in writing, and have a lawyer review it if you consider your IP worth anything in the first place. Nothing would suck worse than signing a perfect agreement only to discover a year later that there was a loophole you'd overlooked and now you're out on your ass.
Not really. While there's certainly no shortage of fossil fuel power stations, there are also many other technologies (solar, wind, nuclear if we can ever get over the paranoia, etc.)
Purely solar powered cars aren't really viable.. you can't guarantee enough sun at exactly when you need it and if you're going to stick in batteries and make it electric anyway, you may as well just move the solar panels off to a more efficient farm.
Wind of course is entirely irrelevant on a car. Much as it would be awesome to see a fleet of cars with giant sails on their roofs, its not particularly practical in the real world.
Nuclear cars are.. not impossible.. but I don't know how practical it would be to build a nuclear cell both small enough and safe enough to put in a car at the same time.
Things like hydro, geothermal, tidal, etc power generation of course don't work on a car since they require specific terrain features to operate.
So yeah, moving to electric vehicles won't kill the oil and gas industry, but it gives us a lot more than one option as a base fuel source. It will however HURT the oil and gas industry so of course they'll fight it tooth and nail for as long as they can, but its a losing battle (at the very least the whole peak oil and eventual production decline is very real even if it has kind of dropped out of the news in the last couple years with the introduction of fracking and new oil field finds.. but we know with 100% certainty that the world is not generating new oil at anywhere close to the rate we're consuming it so eventually it WILL come to pass no matter how long we manage to put it off.)
Keep in mind that there are safety issues involved as well when you're talking about amps on that scale, so even disregarding the weight, this would probably not be a wall-socket style plugin.
Imagine an overhead wire system like you see with many rapid transit and electric bus systems. Or perhaps underneath the car for aesthetic reasons. It would need some sort of initiator that's very difficult to operate manually which would expose (or at least activate) the electrodes. Obviously it would need to be operable by technicians for repair purposes and such, but presumably they'd be trained to not fuck around with high voltage equipment.
So basically you drive in, pay your $$$ and then sit back and wait -- no cables or hoses or whatever. I guess it would need to be a 3 stage system for commercial viability:
1) Car activates initiator.
2) Initiator activates payment terminal.
3) Successful payment activates electrodes.
I don't know how well that would work out in practice of course.. just trying to illustrate that our current method of a cable with a plug on the end that the driver manually has to attach to her vehicle isn't necessarily the only option.
I'm pretty sure assuming the latter implies that the former isn't possible, so there's not much point trying to argue it.
This is easy to short-circuit. If you make the user pick 4 random words, then just exclude "is", "the", "are", etc from the count (but NOT from the phrase.)
So "This is a fairly long phrase" = 4 words, and "bebop camera total banana" also = 4 words.
There will still be certain phrases that will be more common than others of course across a large enough population sample, but discounting the "connector" words allows the user to generate a passphrase that's still grammatically correct and easy to remember for a person but leaves the Bayesian analysis and similar in the dust. (In the example, while the first is probably still a bit easier for the analysis thanks to being grammatically correct, its still 6 "real" words instead of 4 to analyze, essentially adding an entire extra word each to compensate for "is" following "this" frequently and "a" being an extremely common word in general.)
I don't know about their policies specifically, but its usually done so that if someone gets a hold of a password file and manages to break a few passwords, hopefully they'll have changed by the time the attacker tries to actually make use of them.
Of course these practices started way back before things like shadow password files and the such making it MUCH harder to obtain an entire password file without already having broken in anyway.
I don't know how much of an argument there still is for these kind of password rotations, especially when compared against the risk of a post-it note failure or a lost smartphone.
Actually, IP laws are an imposition of a market (the "free" qualifier is up for grabs) on an intangible. Without IP laws, there is no market at all as everyone would just copy everything for $0 (or very close to it. The physical media itself would still represent a market but that's too cheap to be self-sustaining.)
I fail to see how IP laws have anything to do with real wages or the environment (generally speaking.. a patent on a new windmill tech or such notwithstanding.)
I think it could have been the future of music.
That's your problem right there. The studios are only interested in the past of music.
you would need explicit permission to visit a random page prior to visiting said page
Sort of. You typically have permission but you have to assume it implicitly. Being made available (by the copyright owner!) on a public forum is generally a good indication of permission to view (which is not the same as permission to copy, deface, whatever.) Not a guarantee though. There are private websites out there (of course any smart private website will be locked behind technical barriers because legal barriers don't do much unless/until you're able to take someone to court.)
A music track on the other hand is (usually) NOT posted to a public forum.. or at least not by the copyright owner. If they have an inline listening applet on their website then you are most likely granted permission to listen to the song on their website. That does not grant you permission to download the song. If they have a "download this song!" button then you're most likely granted permission to download the song. But similarly, that doesn't imply you have permission to re-post the song elsewhere.
What a publisher decides to do with their copyright is not an all-or-nothing "it exists or it doesn't." You can be granted any number of various permissions. You are implicitly denied any permissions you aren't granted. Most professional websites will likely explicitly enumerate your permissions in a ToS somewhere just to avoid any legal argument of what constitutes an implicit permission.
99% of the time, common sense will tell you what's permitted just by the context. That might not be a strong enough argument for a court, but not being boneheaded and/or stubborn is a good start to not breaking copyright law. For the most part its pretty obvious when you're intentionally ripping off someone else's work, no matter what you say to justify it to yourself. (Though I am no way implying that current copyright law isn't boneheaded itself!)
Ugh. Ribbons. I still can't find 90% of what I want on those stupid things what.. 4+ years after they were introduced? And MS keeps adding them to more and more programs.
They took out the one major advantage of the start menu over metro -- not having to hide whatever else you're doing behind an ugly full screen monstrosity.
I'm guessing they noticed the start menu usage drop right after they made pinning to the task bar easy enough -- that covers probably 80-90% usage for most people if they pin the right programs.
What's amazing is that they thought the start menu lost its worth just because it lost much of its usage.
The win8 start page ended up being more of a glorified taskbar than a glorified start menu, both due to the unintuitive search interface (no indication that you should just start typing -- and the actual search icon is a different search of course) and the flattened folder structure (ie: if a program installs 14 icons into MyCompany\MyProgram under the old start menu, it now is 14 icons pasted directly onto your start page in amongst the icons from every other program you've installed.)
Navigating the win7 Start menu was relatively easy and intuitive. Navigating the win8 start page is pretty much the opposite of that. Its only really "easy" if the only things you ever use are the preinstalled software/icons/links (since its also reasonably unintuitive how to organize the start page. Not that the old start menu was much better for that but the existence of the folder structure tended to keep it from getting so cluttered that you absolutely needed to organize it given that it wasn't something you had to search through too often usually.)
Basically, it sounds mostly like they looked at the raw numbers and made a decision without bothering to check the cause of the usage drop (and more importantly, whether the remaining use cases were still relevant.) You would think the countless amount of bitching from the first day of the announcement forward (and who knows how much internal bitching by their own staff who would almost certainly have been subjected to it first) would have tipped them off but I guess not. Oh well, at least they seem to have learned their lesson for the moment.
The trick of course is knowing whether there's a secondary channel that they use to send the PII and associated hash that they wouldn't generally provide to anyone except say the NSA.
Of course a packet sniffer would find that out easily enough, and I'm guessing that someone would have already done so and let the world know if that was the case (and thus its probably not,) but simply being anonymized in the data you have doesn't directly imply that there isn't additional data somewhere capable of de-anonymizing it.
"Comey cited damned near every other case as examples of situations where quick access by authorities to information on cellphones can damage lives."
Oh wait.. he didn't mention that part.
Yep, and you can expect just as much protection against anyone who cares to look.
I'm thinking more subtle corruptions than "nothing works." Silently putting in Mar.1 instead of Feb.29 on a leap year because of some bad math and nobody noticed until November when the accountant starts reviewing for your end of year. If you just look at the dashboard, it will only reflect what's in the database. On the other hand if you go back and pull the Feb.29 and Mar.1 reports, you (may) be able to distinguish the data from each day in order to manually correct the records.
I'm a little stumped at how food and water could ever not benefit someone? Maybe if you have a really bad allergy? If you're acting out the gluttony scene from Se7en? Or conversely, how a lack of food could ever benefit someone.
I agree with the rest of your examples though.
So if you could figure out what signal is being sent for the ping and duplicate it, all good right?
And yes I'm sure tampering would be nailed in the contract (along with the standard "but if the fuckup is on our end then hah hah too bad" EULA crap.)