You're wrong, a contract (under Canadian law, but almost everywhere is similar) a contract must be for something, have real value (consideration) for each party, be of the appropriate form for the type of contract (real estate transfers require special contracts, etc), be clear (heh right), etc.
While your signature is proof (such as it is) that you've signed something, if that thing isn't a contract then you can't be expected (legally) to abide by it.
However, many schools either don't understand this, or are banking on you not, and making you sign a code of conduct or similar and implying that it says "and I Name, agree to follow these rules as above". However, the real contract you signed with them was so one-sider they could kick your out on graduation day for an administrative error and not owe you a diploma or a dime, so you probably did agree to abide by codes of conduct already, so your signature is just proof they were shown to you.
A school should be as hands-off as Home Depot, or any other business YOU pay.
I don't understand how people got suckered into acting like the school was doing them a favor by taking thousands of dollars a year, plus thousands more of tax money, to teach them. Probably the same people who think someone is doing them a favor paying them $8 an hour for their work.
Where do schools get off claiming copyright on student works, patent rights on student research, censorship rights on and off-school grounds, etc? If Home Depot tried to say you couldn't have a blog about your purchasing experience in the store, you could tell them to take a flying leap. If you'd signed a contract with them (as a student does) they'd be obligated to fulfill that contract.
Well, it's kind of irrelevant. This big universities are growing more irrelevant everyday as technology advances faster than their reneissance-era structure allows them to. Technical schools are eating their lunch in almost all fields (except medical and law, because the degree is a legal requirement of practice - nice protected business model). Rising tuitions, growing course irrelevance, low real-world abilities of graduates, and fast modern competition, the education market is going to collapse. $120 dollar mandatory non-transferable textbooks are just one example of endemic corruption in higher education.
Besides, Griefers in a "real" feeling game like Eve have a much more in-game justification than in Ultima Online in the day.
In Eve a Griefer is a pirate, or maybe a Privateer. They may still suck to get killed by, but pirate hunting is another long real-world tradition, and like snipers in WW2 games, eventually you go in and smoke them out, rich with all their phat loots. At that point, as a player, they're much more fun to kill than any "mobs".
I guess my point is that in an arbitrary world where everyone has a sword yet can't hit anyone else with it, Griefers exploit many loopholes in the system to bug everyone but you usually have no recourse. In a world ruled by economics that Griefer can only piss so many people off before he's chased by PC bounty hunters.
Eve's great, but that greatness is precisely what the average WoWer looking to hit level 60 doesn't want.
Eve is open, no top limits. Nothing to brag about - there's always someone, or a consortium, with a higher number. Non-gametime skill growth. Nothing to do better to level faster. A non-IRC interface. It's not a "group with 50 people and chat while buffing" type of game.
I agree that Eve kicks ass, but I've always loved tactical space sims and have been playing them multiplayer since Galactic Empire (anyone else ever play this or Infinity Complex? I played them on Shoreline in Vancouver) on the BBSes, or Compuserve's game before that.
To most people, they want to chat with people while playing something akin to Progress Quest with knobs and buttons.
That style of MMOG will get cool when it's like Quake with 600 marines assaulting an installation together, or Soul Calibur where people are all in the thick of it, not just macroing some class/level based set of actions.
This is made worse by WoW's player and designer history. StarCraft is one of the most build-order based games, where an SCV out of order can doom you against an equal player. This isn't a game of intuition and complex play style, it's a game of following the best strategy for a 45th-50th level Warlock, over and over again.
But, for people who want that, Eve is NOT an option.
I dislike games where you can't not die the first time you play it. The fantasy is that one person, your character, can actually do all this stuff - that you're playing a fantasy 007 who just is *that* good. But when the game is impossible to survive, not just very hard, but impossible, it completely breaks that.
I'm referring to totally unmarked traps (with no way of detection via thrown stuff, etc), leaps of faith (Super Mario!) or other things that would be guaranteed to kill someone who didn't happen to guess right. I guess the point is that Bond is lucky, but he doesn't play Russian Roulette without cheating, he doesn't rely on it. He'd never jump blindly, hoping for a handy ledge, neither should the character have to.
This doesn't seem much different because of save-games, but they do make it less frustrating. I think it depends more on the culture of the developer. If I were to divide everything into two camps, there'd be the console camp where saves are a reward and where you're just expected to be thankful it didn't cost a quarter, and the PC camp where you can save at almost any time, have handy quicksave keys, etc. It feels like the difference between a performer playing to a captive audience, or not. If your market doesn't have any choice, just repackage the arcade games. If your market does have a choice (as on PCs, where you don't pay through the nose for the permission to develop a game) you usually can't command that sort of thing. (Unless you're Rockstar releasing the hottest console game on a PC, but even still it lost them a lot of points in reviews...)
No, you don't. You don't work for a CA, and they don't provide this service. Or, you know this and are lying.
I mean, they say they do, but as others point out, citibank.com, citiibank.com, citybank.com, etc, can all get a cert and can claim anything they want on the website once its setup. Certs don't help even one iota in avoiding phishing. And it's trivial to register a domain for someone if you can get access to almost any incoming communication stream. You can do it by redirecting DNS and catching the email, hacking the voicemail system and catching incoming calls (apply for the cert at 3am - nobody else will try to take the call). I know it's this easy because I've gotten certs for most of my customers and depending on the company there were different hoops, but no actual obstacles.
Whatever sticker you can come up with to stick on a "trusted" site, someone else can fake well enough to fool everyone who doesn't check every digit of the key fingerprint with the representative on the phone. It's like ssh fingerprints - you don't need a perfect collision, just find one with the same beginning and end - how many people remember their whole key fingerprint? Similarly, whatever hoops your average-joe IT guy can jump through to register can be jumped through by any reasonably talented hacker from the other side of the globe.
Pfah. It's the USA trying to bully their way into everything. They're in a BAD way over electricity and Canada is sitting pretty, on way more hydro power than they know what to do with, except sell south at crippling prices. The US'd be in a bad place without Canadian electricity, grain, and oil, both as a direct import, and as a safe buffer to call upon. Instead of doing the Canadian thing, and asking nicely for good treatment, the USA via the World Bank, et al have been pressuring Canada into very unfavorable privitisation deals (They're poor deals for everyone but the people buying the once-public utility) and crap like this softwood lumber dispute.
But, if everyone was friends, Canada would have to stop charging ruinous prices (to already bankrupt states...) and I don't think anyone in Canada wants that. As long as Canada is in the lead, the USA will keep any crazy dispute alive as long as they can - witness Mad Cow, which was totally brushed off when it showed up in the US.
I don't think Canadian government is trying that hard to make nice. There's best-friend status, and favoured-trading-partner. One lets you gouge the other party.
Besides, George W. Bush *is* a fucking moron. But yeah, blame Canada for that too!
I was thinking of stores like Circuit City as being agents of the publisher, as they often do enter into special publicity deals. But, when this isn't the case, the publisher sold the work outright to stores like yours, and has even less say.
And as to the EULAs having some weight, I think the more correct thing to do is to say that they do not in fact hold any weight, but are sometimes coincidentaly right about the legal facts.
I'm not terribly familiar with USA law, but isn't it against the law to present something as a valid contract when you should know that it isn't? At least, I'd wager that you could make a very troublesome case for fraud (misleading a customer as to the value of the transaction with intent to profit). If only the people could force prosecution for criminal actions. Many things are very obviously illegal, but ignored.
Sure, but let's say you were playing the real GTA, the one where hookers don't dis you. You've seen a ton of hot cars rolling by on the street, so you enter a mission to steal one, and all of a sudden there's only one in the whole city, in a locked garage with a guard.
I mean, maybe all the 'vette owners in the city did just decide to leave the state for a day, a rally or something, sure...
Things don't have to be like real life, but they need to not be arbitrary and change based on the designers convenience.
If you can blow up tanks, flimsy wooden doors with cheap locks shouldn't keep you out.
Depends what the cheats are, and what you call destroying gameplay. Some people play Oblivion like Nethack, restarting completely when they die. Some people eschew the fast-travel system, preferring to visit every piece of virtual landscape directly.
I on the other hand don't have the ability to concentrate closely enough on every dungeon wall and have been killed a few times by traps (I play with deadlier traps - oncoming spiked logs should HURT) and have merely reloaded. Is it a cheat, or much more fun? I use fast-travel extensively, from one side of a city to another, because I've played a lot of these games and don't need to hear the same two chat lines repeated endlessly as I walk around the city for the umpteenth time.
I find my gaming experience VASTLY improved by "cheats". In games that don't allow these features, I enable themselves myself with console commands, simply to avoid "play" (I use the term lightly) that involves running over the same map from end to end. Did you ever play Heretic or Hexen? If so, you know the blecherousness of which I speak.
Imho, a bad game ruins a game. Cheats just let people skip all the crap until they realize they don't actually like much of it. Doom on the other hand, kept us going for years because its cheats let us play exactly what we wanted to, and it was always fun.
Consideration is something that both parties find useful. You may sell me dandelion dreams, if I were to agree to them on delivery, but simply because you claim something to be valid consideration doesn't mean that I would think so.
Considering that I already legally have the full and unlimited usage rights to this software, the EULA can't offer much. Further, because it's mandatory to click 'I Agree' to use your software, you have to do it even if you disagree with the EULA, and thus doing so does not indicate agreement.
To be enforceable, an EULA would have to be a valid offer, refusable without losing your existing rights, and not restricting the access to the software or your data at any point. To do this it would need to offer a further enticement (a chance to win a cruise, etc) to get you to agree, and to let you use the software unmolested even after saying 'No'.
As the agent of the software distributors, entering into a contract with the store (for sale) is nearly the same as entering into it with the distributor themselves.
Second, a license is *not* needed to use or view a copyrighted work, NOR to make ephemeral copies, as needed by the technology and intended use of the work. In other words, explicit consent has been given for text-2-speech converters, copying to ram, to framebuffer, etc. Like reading a book you find at a bus stop, using software you find in such a place is equally legal regardless of any license, or intent of the author.
You can contract to the contrary, but if you don't realize you're doing it, it likely isn't binding anyways, so unless you did so in a room with a bunch of lawyers and IBM salesmen, likely none of the software you use is licensed in this fashion.
An EULA tries to limit your usage of the software - something you're legally entitled to from purchasing it.
The GPL offers to waive some distribution rights - something you're not legally entitled to do by default.
As such, the GPL is an Offer of a future contract (to distribute, follow these rules...) and if you enter into it (as you otherwise would do by calling the author and negotiating directly) then you are bound by it, like any other valid contract. An EULA is forced upon you post-sale, and attempts to take your rights away under guise of an optional contract.
Likely, EULAs in their current form could be found to be extortionist and I wonder if a future class-action lawsuit will address this.
That's the BSA take on it, but the correct interpretation, the one more supported by the legal system, is that an EULA is a post-sale restriction, not a contract. If you were given the EULA to read and had to indicate your understanding of and acceptance of the terms before sale, it would be a contract.
Basic summary. Not worth the paper it's printed on - absolutely no legal weight.
I just finished playing Oblivion. It's a perfect example of the enemies always being a level above you. You can literally go anywhere in the game, even into "Oblivion", as a second level character with a wood club and beat the game. But *every* bandit in the game has $30k in armor later in the game, even when they ask for the same $100 bribe. If they fell upon one of their own, they'd be rich for life, but instead they extort the peasantry for pennies. Sucks. Ass.
Luckily, as soon as it came out many modders changed the loot progression, the leveling world, the way skills and levels work, etc. Now, with the right collection of mods, the world is a scary place. Walk into the wrong areas and bandits will gut you for lunch money. Come back with better skills and kill three with a single spell.
Anyways, one way to make this work is to make defense easier. There are a lot of good ways to keep people away. Polearms, caltrops, a doorway. Another was is to make "hit points" not change much as you get more powerful. Like in real life. One bullet can stop Rambo. What keeps you alive is building defensive skills, armor, well-chosen weapons, tactical advantage, stealth, etc. This way combat becomes more guerilla in nature, instead of standing around trading sword blows like a Final Fantasy game.
That's the same lame argument MS used with Windows XP. It's *never* a problem for me because everytime I install at a lan party or anything, it's from a cracked version of XP Pro. Pity the poor sods who have to do it legitimately. Limited installs, locked to similar hardware, etc. I've swapped video cards, HDs, NICs, and such at lan parties, built new machines from impromptu shopping trips. This "should only change once a year, tops" is for the CEO's computer at the game companies, everyone who works in the industries changes them around daily.
Sure, a person *should* never hit the 'new computer' thing, upgrading only a few parts at a time. But it happens. Forums abound with someone coming home with a new nic and video card and all of a sudden, getting told they're on a different machine. "Just call and ask for more" is the same stupid line MS spins. Like anyone should have to sit on the phone with some company to prove they have the right to install software. That sounds like a lot of fun at a lan party!
Besides, my friends and I usually break out OLD games (Test Drive 3, Loderunner on the Apple 2) in emulators for a break at lan parties. We certainly aren't going to settle for a system where we can't play old games, such as the one Steam offers. Nor, I'll point out, for any OSes that we can't do this with.
No sir, anything I buy I'm going to control, or I won't buy it.
Besides, there's the Oblivion/Morrowind argument against Steam and consoles, the best (all!) mods came out for the PC. Completely downloadable, completely sharable, completely compatible, and yet because of the "protection" on Steam and consoles, neither set of users got to use mods. Enjoy your little plastic gaming world, it's all you'll ever get if you allow it to be locked down under you.
There's a clever scam with any system that lets you take your vote. Person 1 goes to vote and gets a ballot, but doesn't deposit it. He marks it and gives it to person 2 to deposit, and return with a blank. You can't know if the stooge deposits your vote, but you can be sure he doesn't vote against you because you get his blank ballot.
The guard for this is to void ballots when taken. The only path to the voting box is a plexiglass slide from the e-voting machine. The user would, I forsee, slide the paper ballot to a vote-reader machine, which should read the same vote the user entered, and the vote they see in large type on the paper. If the machine disagrees, or the vote has the e-version of hanging chad, you'll see this when you try to scan it.
It's just paper ballots with 1) non-removable/insertable ballots, 2) e-assistance in voting (show candidate photos, etc, to make sure it's the right person) 3) checking with the authoritative machine and only keeping the vote if it's what you want, 4) authoritative human-readable text, not machine-coded mag-stripe
"[...] just so that one does not get the impression, that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate."...
Q: "is there anything in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that suggests the president is that far of a sovereign, that far above the law?"
"NIXON: No, there isn't."...
In other words, the guy who tried that defense didn't get very far with it either.
It's a crime, the president will of course be forgiven if he can show that he believes strongly enough that those actions were worth violating the rights of those he was sworn to protect. You're acting like these things aren't an issue simply because they're being done by someone who likely won't get punished.
What you fail to see is that the wiretaps *are* illegal, as seen in many many cases against not-presidents. The fact that this president may not directly be found to be personally responsible, or immune to the charges for one reason or another doesn't change this.
For instance, driving through an intersection at high speeds against the light is a crime, unless by a police officer who is responding to a crime, etc, etc... Let's say the cop drives through an intersection with sirens on, on his way to get donuts (not an emergency), and you follow him through. You'd both have committed a crime, but he's in the position of the president, most-likely completely immune to the accusation, though technically still possibly at risk.
You're saying that just because the cop (president) isn't going to be punished, that he didn't break the law.
I think that's weak. We have laws for a reason, to stop hot-heads from doing whatever they think is right without consulting others. Those actions might include speeding, fighting, wiretapping... To let anyone hold themselves above the law is dangerous, and for you to promote this for them 1seems worse.
It only takes one of those wiretaps to be unwarranted and it's a technical crime. Why act like legal immunity is the same as legal actions?
What I don't understand is how this "game" where most of the character building is in random battles that (last I looked at FF?) still used the Bard's Tale style of combat (stacks of monsters, front line of PCs, back line of PCs, etc, etc).
It was lame on my Apple2 in 86. In the same era I was playing RPGs like Ultima that let me move each character independently, modify the world (did dungeons stay dead on the console?)
How in any way do you derive even the slightest fun from console RPGs? I admit to only playing a few, but they were all so bad that I read a magazine while everyone else was crowing about pulling zeny coins out of the ground, or slashing yet another stack of monsters with their oversized sword. (Zelda 64 and FF6-8??)
Admittedly, Zelda 64 was a far worse game than FF appeared to be. Whoever made the N64 was probably as smart as a mentally defective rock. The 3rd-person camera would swing to avoid obstacles, meaning you had to then press in a different direction to keep moving straight. Combine this with a "game" where all the puzzles seem to be jumping ones where there's always something to screw with the camera at a critical time... Mario 64 was worse, and the game... dishwater has more personality than the yet another Mario clone.
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You're wrong, a contract (under Canadian law, but almost everywhere is similar) a contract must be for something, have real value (consideration) for each party, be of the appropriate form for the type of contract (real estate transfers require special contracts, etc), be clear (heh right), etc.
While your signature is proof (such as it is) that you've signed something, if that thing isn't a contract then you can't be expected (legally) to abide by it.
However, many schools either don't understand this, or are banking on you not, and making you sign a code of conduct or similar and implying that it says "and I Name, agree to follow these rules as above". However, the real contract you signed with them was so one-sider they could kick your out on graduation day for an administrative error and not owe you a diploma or a dime, so you probably did agree to abide by codes of conduct already, so your signature is just proof they were shown to you.
A school should be as hands-off as Home Depot, or any other business YOU pay.
I don't understand how people got suckered into acting like the school was doing them a favor by taking thousands of dollars a year, plus thousands more of tax money, to teach them. Probably the same people who think someone is doing them a favor paying them $8 an hour for their work.
Where do schools get off claiming copyright on student works, patent rights on student research, censorship rights on and off-school grounds, etc? If Home Depot tried to say you couldn't have a blog about your purchasing experience in the store, you could tell them to take a flying leap. If you'd signed a contract with them (as a student does) they'd be obligated to fulfill that contract.
Well, it's kind of irrelevant. This big universities are growing more irrelevant everyday as technology advances faster than their reneissance-era structure allows them to. Technical schools are eating their lunch in almost all fields (except medical and law, because the degree is a legal requirement of practice - nice protected business model). Rising tuitions, growing course irrelevance, low real-world abilities of graduates, and fast modern competition, the education market is going to collapse. $120 dollar mandatory non-transferable textbooks are just one example of endemic corruption in higher education.
Besides, Griefers in a "real" feeling game like Eve have a much more in-game justification than in Ultima Online in the day.
In Eve a Griefer is a pirate, or maybe a Privateer. They may still suck to get killed by, but pirate hunting is another long real-world tradition, and like snipers in WW2 games, eventually you go in and smoke them out, rich with all their phat loots. At that point, as a player, they're much more fun to kill than any "mobs".
I guess my point is that in an arbitrary world where everyone has a sword yet can't hit anyone else with it, Griefers exploit many loopholes in the system to bug everyone but you usually have no recourse. In a world ruled by economics that Griefer can only piss so many people off before he's chased by PC bounty hunters.
Eve's great, but that greatness is precisely what the average WoWer looking to hit level 60 doesn't want.
Eve is open, no top limits. Nothing to brag about - there's always someone, or a consortium, with a higher number.
Non-gametime skill growth. Nothing to do better to level faster.
A non-IRC interface. It's not a "group with 50 people and chat while buffing" type of game.
I agree that Eve kicks ass, but I've always loved tactical space sims and have been playing them multiplayer since Galactic Empire (anyone else ever play this or Infinity Complex? I played them on Shoreline in Vancouver) on the BBSes, or Compuserve's game before that.
To most people, they want to chat with people while playing something akin to Progress Quest with knobs and buttons.
That style of MMOG will get cool when it's like Quake with 600 marines assaulting an installation together, or Soul Calibur where people are all in the thick of it, not just macroing some class/level based set of actions.
This is made worse by WoW's player and designer history. StarCraft is one of the most build-order based games, where an SCV out of order can doom you against an equal player. This isn't a game of intuition and complex play style, it's a game of following the best strategy for a 45th-50th level Warlock, over and over again.
But, for people who want that, Eve is NOT an option.
That, in a nutshell, is why consoles suck.
I dislike games where you can't not die the first time you play it. The fantasy is that one person, your character, can actually do all this stuff - that you're playing a fantasy 007 who just is *that* good. But when the game is impossible to survive, not just very hard, but impossible, it completely breaks that.
I'm referring to totally unmarked traps (with no way of detection via thrown stuff, etc), leaps of faith (Super Mario!) or other things that would be guaranteed to kill someone who didn't happen to guess right. I guess the point is that Bond is lucky, but he doesn't play Russian Roulette without cheating, he doesn't rely on it. He'd never jump blindly, hoping for a handy ledge, neither should the character have to.
This doesn't seem much different because of save-games, but they do make it less frustrating. I think it depends more on the culture of the developer. If I were to divide everything into two camps, there'd be the console camp where saves are a reward and where you're just expected to be thankful it didn't cost a quarter, and the PC camp where you can save at almost any time, have handy quicksave keys, etc. It feels like the difference between a performer playing to a captive audience, or not. If your market doesn't have any choice, just repackage the arcade games. If your market does have a choice (as on PCs, where you don't pay through the nose for the permission to develop a game) you usually can't command that sort of thing. (Unless you're Rockstar releasing the hottest console game on a PC, but even still it lost them a lot of points in reviews...)
Hell, that's great. It could be Telus, they struggle to deliver three sevens.
"Lucky seven, come on lucky seven!"
No, you don't. You don't work for a CA, and they don't provide this service. Or, you know this and are lying.
I mean, they say they do, but as others point out, citibank.com, citiibank.com, citybank.com, etc, can all get a cert and can claim anything they want on the website once its setup. Certs don't help even one iota in avoiding phishing. And it's trivial to register a domain for someone if you can get access to almost any incoming communication stream. You can do it by redirecting DNS and catching the email, hacking the voicemail system and catching incoming calls (apply for the cert at 3am - nobody else will try to take the call). I know it's this easy because I've gotten certs for most of my customers and depending on the company there were different hoops, but no actual obstacles.
Whatever sticker you can come up with to stick on a "trusted" site, someone else can fake well enough to fool everyone who doesn't check every digit of the key fingerprint with the representative on the phone. It's like ssh fingerprints - you don't need a perfect collision, just find one with the same beginning and end - how many people remember their whole key fingerprint? Similarly, whatever hoops your average-joe IT guy can jump through to register can be jumped through by any reasonably talented hacker from the other side of the globe.
Pfah. It's the USA trying to bully their way into everything. They're in a BAD way over electricity and Canada is sitting pretty, on way more hydro power than they know what to do with, except sell south at crippling prices. The US'd be in a bad place without Canadian electricity, grain, and oil, both as a direct import, and as a safe buffer to call upon. Instead of doing the Canadian thing, and asking nicely for good treatment, the USA via the World Bank, et al have been pressuring Canada into very unfavorable privitisation deals (They're poor deals for everyone but the people buying the once-public utility) and crap like this softwood lumber dispute.
But, if everyone was friends, Canada would have to stop charging ruinous prices (to already bankrupt states...) and I don't think anyone in Canada wants that. As long as Canada is in the lead, the USA will keep any crazy dispute alive as long as they can - witness Mad Cow, which was totally brushed off when it showed up in the US.
I don't think Canadian government is trying that hard to make nice. There's best-friend status, and favoured-trading-partner. One lets you gouge the other party.
Besides, George W. Bush *is* a fucking moron. But yeah, blame Canada for that too!
I was thinking of stores like Circuit City as being agents of the publisher, as they often do enter into special publicity deals. But, when this isn't the case, the publisher sold the work outright to stores like yours, and has even less say.
And as to the EULAs having some weight, I think the more correct thing to do is to say that they do not in fact hold any weight, but are sometimes coincidentaly right about the legal facts.
I'm not terribly familiar with USA law, but isn't it against the law to present something as a valid contract when you should know that it isn't? At least, I'd wager that you could make a very troublesome case for fraud (misleading a customer as to the value of the transaction with intent to profit). If only the people could force prosecution for criminal actions. Many things are very obviously illegal, but ignored.
Sure, but let's say you were playing the real GTA, the one where hookers don't dis you. You've seen a ton of hot cars rolling by on the street, so you enter a mission to steal one, and all of a sudden there's only one in the whole city, in a locked garage with a guard.
I mean, maybe all the 'vette owners in the city did just decide to leave the state for a day, a rally or something, sure...
Things don't have to be like real life, but they need to not be arbitrary and change based on the designers convenience.
If you can blow up tanks, flimsy wooden doors with cheap locks shouldn't keep you out.
Depends what the cheats are, and what you call destroying gameplay. Some people play Oblivion like Nethack, restarting completely when they die. Some people eschew the fast-travel system, preferring to visit every piece of virtual landscape directly.
I on the other hand don't have the ability to concentrate closely enough on every dungeon wall and have been killed a few times by traps (I play with deadlier traps - oncoming spiked logs should HURT) and have merely reloaded. Is it a cheat, or much more fun? I use fast-travel extensively, from one side of a city to another, because I've played a lot of these games and don't need to hear the same two chat lines repeated endlessly as I walk around the city for the umpteenth time.
I find my gaming experience VASTLY improved by "cheats". In games that don't allow these features, I enable themselves myself with console commands, simply to avoid "play" (I use the term lightly) that involves running over the same map from end to end. Did you ever play Heretic or Hexen? If so, you know the blecherousness of which I speak.
Imho, a bad game ruins a game. Cheats just let people skip all the crap until they realize they don't actually like much of it. Doom on the other hand, kept us going for years because its cheats let us play exactly what we wanted to, and it was always fun.
Consideration is something that both parties find useful. You may sell me dandelion dreams, if I were to agree to them on delivery, but simply because you claim something to be valid consideration doesn't mean that I would think so.
Considering that I already legally have the full and unlimited usage rights to this software, the EULA can't offer much. Further, because it's mandatory to click 'I Agree' to use your software, you have to do it even if you disagree with the EULA, and thus doing so does not indicate agreement.
To be enforceable, an EULA would have to be a valid offer, refusable without losing your existing rights, and not restricting the access to the software or your data at any point. To do this it would need to offer a further enticement (a chance to win a cruise, etc) to get you to agree, and to let you use the software unmolested even after saying 'No'.
You are under a few misconceptions.
As the agent of the software distributors, entering into a contract with the store (for sale) is nearly the same as entering into it with the distributor themselves.
Second, a license is *not* needed to use or view a copyrighted work, NOR to make ephemeral copies, as needed by the technology and intended use of the work. In other words, explicit consent has been given for text-2-speech converters, copying to ram, to framebuffer, etc. Like reading a book you find at a bus stop, using software you find in such a place is equally legal regardless of any license, or intent of the author.
You can contract to the contrary, but if you don't realize you're doing it, it likely isn't binding anyways, so unless you did so in a room with a bunch of lawyers and IBM salesmen, likely none of the software you use is licensed in this fashion.
If you're not trolling, here's the difference...
An EULA tries to limit your usage of the software - something you're legally entitled to from purchasing it.
The GPL offers to waive some distribution rights - something you're not legally entitled to do by default.
As such, the GPL is an Offer of a future contract (to distribute, follow these rules...) and if you enter into it (as you otherwise would do by calling the author and negotiating directly) then you are bound by it, like any other valid contract. An EULA is forced upon you post-sale, and attempts to take your rights away under guise of an optional contract.
Likely, EULAs in their current form could be found to be extortionist and I wonder if a future class-action lawsuit will address this.
That's the BSA take on it, but the correct interpretation, the one more supported by the legal system, is that an EULA is a post-sale restriction, not a contract. If you were given the EULA to read and had to indicate your understanding of and acceptance of the terms before sale, it would be a contract.
Basic summary. Not worth the paper it's printed on - absolutely no legal weight.
afaik, Oblivion under Steam can't be modded, or not without a crack. I had assumed this was just a Steam policy of anti-tampering or something.
I just finished playing Oblivion. It's a perfect example of the enemies always being a level above you. You can literally go anywhere in the game, even into "Oblivion", as a second level character with a wood club and beat the game. But *every* bandit in the game has $30k in armor later in the game, even when they ask for the same $100 bribe. If they fell upon one of their own, they'd be rich for life, but instead they extort the peasantry for pennies. Sucks. Ass.
Luckily, as soon as it came out many modders changed the loot progression, the leveling world, the way skills and levels work, etc. Now, with the right collection of mods, the world is a scary place. Walk into the wrong areas and bandits will gut you for lunch money. Come back with better skills and kill three with a single spell.
Anyways, one way to make this work is to make defense easier. There are a lot of good ways to keep people away. Polearms, caltrops, a doorway. Another was is to make "hit points" not change much as you get more powerful. Like in real life. One bullet can stop Rambo. What keeps you alive is building defensive skills, armor, well-chosen weapons, tactical advantage, stealth, etc. This way combat becomes more guerilla in nature, instead of standing around trading sword blows like a Final Fantasy game.
That's the same lame argument MS used with Windows XP. It's *never* a problem for me because everytime I install at a lan party or anything, it's from a cracked version of XP Pro. Pity the poor sods who have to do it legitimately. Limited installs, locked to similar hardware, etc. I've swapped video cards, HDs, NICs, and such at lan parties, built new machines from impromptu shopping trips. This "should only change once a year, tops" is for the CEO's computer at the game companies, everyone who works in the industries changes them around daily.
Sure, a person *should* never hit the 'new computer' thing, upgrading only a few parts at a time. But it happens. Forums abound with someone coming home with a new nic and video card and all of a sudden, getting told they're on a different machine. "Just call and ask for more" is the same stupid line MS spins. Like anyone should have to sit on the phone with some company to prove they have the right to install software. That sounds like a lot of fun at a lan party!
Besides, my friends and I usually break out OLD games (Test Drive 3, Loderunner on the Apple 2) in emulators for a break at lan parties. We certainly aren't going to settle for a system where we can't play old games, such as the one Steam offers. Nor, I'll point out, for any OSes that we can't do this with.
No sir, anything I buy I'm going to control, or I won't buy it.
Besides, there's the Oblivion/Morrowind argument against Steam and consoles, the best (all!) mods came out for the PC. Completely downloadable, completely sharable, completely compatible, and yet because of the "protection" on Steam and consoles, neither set of users got to use mods. Enjoy your little plastic gaming world, it's all you'll ever get if you allow it to be locked down under you.
There's a clever scam with any system that lets you take your vote. Person 1 goes to vote and gets a ballot, but doesn't deposit it. He marks it and gives it to person 2 to deposit, and return with a blank. You can't know if the stooge deposits your vote, but you can be sure he doesn't vote against you because you get his blank ballot.
The guard for this is to void ballots when taken. The only path to the voting box is a plexiglass slide from the e-voting machine. The user would, I forsee, slide the paper ballot to a vote-reader machine, which should read the same vote the user entered, and the vote they see in large type on the paper. If the machine disagrees, or the vote has the e-version of hanging chad, you'll see this when you try to scan it.
It's just paper ballots with 1) non-removable/insertable ballots, 2) e-assistance in voting (show candidate photos, etc, to make sure it's the right person) 3) checking with the authoritative machine and only keeping the vote if it's what you want, 4) authoritative human-readable text, not machine-coded mag-stripe
What kind of sick porn do you look at, that child rape is frequently mixed in?
What possible motice could organized crime have for giving away warez? Where's the money?
"[...] just so that one does not get the impression, that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate." ...
...
Q: "is there anything in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that suggests the president is that far of a sovereign, that far above the law?"
"NIXON: No, there isn't."
In other words, the guy who tried that defense didn't get very far with it either.
It's a crime, the president will of course be forgiven if he can show that he believes strongly enough that those actions were worth violating the rights of those he was sworn to protect. You're acting like these things aren't an issue simply because they're being done by someone who likely won't get punished.
What you fail to see is that the wiretaps *are* illegal, as seen in many many cases against not-presidents. The fact that this president may not directly be found to be personally responsible, or immune to the charges for one reason or another doesn't change this.
For instance, driving through an intersection at high speeds against the light is a crime, unless by a police officer who is responding to a crime, etc, etc... Let's say the cop drives through an intersection with sirens on, on his way to get donuts (not an emergency), and you follow him through. You'd both have committed a crime, but he's in the position of the president, most-likely completely immune to the accusation, though technically still possibly at risk.
You're saying that just because the cop (president) isn't going to be punished, that he didn't break the law.
I think that's weak. We have laws for a reason, to stop hot-heads from doing whatever they think is right without consulting others. Those actions might include speeding, fighting, wiretapping... To let anyone hold themselves above the law is dangerous, and for you to promote this for them 1seems worse.
It only takes one of those wiretaps to be unwarranted and it's a technical crime. Why act like legal immunity is the same as legal actions?
What I don't understand is how this "game" where most of the character building is in random battles that (last I looked at FF?) still used the Bard's Tale style of combat (stacks of monsters, front line of PCs, back line of PCs, etc, etc).
It was lame on my Apple2 in 86. In the same era I was playing RPGs like Ultima that let me move each character independently, modify the world (did dungeons stay dead on the console?)
How in any way do you derive even the slightest fun from console RPGs? I admit to only playing a few, but they were all so bad that I read a magazine while everyone else was crowing about pulling zeny coins out of the ground, or slashing yet another stack of monsters with their oversized sword. (Zelda 64 and FF6-8??)
Admittedly, Zelda 64 was a far worse game than FF appeared to be. Whoever made the N64 was probably as smart as a mentally defective rock. The 3rd-person camera would swing to avoid obstacles, meaning you had to then press in a different direction to keep moving straight. Combine this with a "game" where all the puzzles seem to be jumping ones where there's always something to screw with the camera at a critical time... Mario 64 was worse, and the game... dishwater has more personality than the yet another Mario clone.