The issue is that if you find a way to level the playing field, someone will learn to play the game better than everyone else and you're right back to where you started. Companies used to exploit workers because you had to work somewhere if you wanted to survive and there were few laws against it. They used to rule with iron fists, threatening to fire people at every turn, or straight up beating them or subjecting them to other inhumane treatment.
Then the law stepped in with a new civilized way of handling matters. Now you have to take your disputes to court, they said, where a judge can enact justice! Here are new laws to go by. As a result, companies still exploit workers and rule with iron fists backed up by massive legal departments and boatloads of money instead of a few strong guys that don't care to beat the shit out of you.
There's a little coffee shop near campus that has excellent coffee and wonderful food. I've eaten there twice since I started going to school years ago. Why? Because people will go in, order a cup of coffee that costs a dollar, then unpack all their stuff into seats by them, their laptop, a keyboard, a mouse, their books, their umbrella, the lunch they packed, and their mp3 player. Then they'll sit there for four hours while they do their homework, taking up enough space for FIVE people, on a single dollar. Then they'll pack up and leave. Won't even tip.
Regardless, outlets aren't the best way to do this. Maybe a good nonconfrontational way, but not the best. The best way is to have a sign posted, and proactively kick people out that don't limit themselves to an hour or so. Maybe make a 'ten bucks unlimited coffee all day' deal.
CompUSA: 40GB Western Digitial Hard Drive, 7200 RPM: $250. Newegg: 40GB Western Digital Hard Drive, $65.
BestBuy: GeForce 250 Video Card: $199 Newegg: GeForce 250 Video Card: $80 with $20 rebate
Walmart: 1TB External USB Drive: $129.99 Newegg: 1TB External USB Drive: $129.99
Even fucking Walmart has a clue when it comes to computer parts, how come the other stores couldn't? I understand margins are low, but margins are even lower if not many people buy from there.
This might work for Blockbuster Video, but I would be PISSED if I spent hours of my life troubleshooting and trying to get some part to work for my PC and found out that it was returned defective, remarked, and put on the shelf. At that point I'd be asking for compensation for my time and effort, since they knowingly and willingly tried to put a defective product for sale. Or hey, we can go to small claims court for theft by deception..
Great for the MBA that has slightly better sales than they would have, bad for the company who is going to get sued one day for false advertising, which will become a class action because everyone is going to want a piece of the pie. In the end, the company will pay out a few hundred grand to lawyers and some coupons to people that were inconvenienced..because most people won't be able to prove how much they got overcharged.
Maybe this is the marketing engine revving up for someone's 'next generation' product. The base model will start off real cheap. Maybe $100 for a launch product. The launch day games will be playable. A few months later, hey, you require 2GB of RAM to play this and only have one. You zip to your local Walmart and find that the extra gigabyte of slow ConsoleRAM is another $100, when you paid that much for four gigabytes of fast PC RAM a year prior. I bet you want Wireless G or N for that too, don't you?
We let everyone access our console by making them cheap! It's totally up to you whether you want to pay the latest and greatest! If not, you can stick to the games that came out last year, but we might even release a patch that makes them require new hardware.
See, this was thought up by a marketing genius. Absolute genius, I tell you. Why don't most people buy consoles more often? A big initial investment for little initial return. You pay $299 for a console, a controller, and a game. A single game. In essence, that game cost you $299. Reduce that to less than the cost of two games alone, and you've got a whole open market. It would also bring PC-style bragging rights into the modern arena. My Console has twelve gigabytes of RAM and a $500 video card, obviously your Console with only four gigabytes and a $200 video card bogs down on Quake 1. It would also take pressure off developers when it comes to optimization. They don't have to sit there for months and take shit from the art department, telling them that they gotta squeeze forty hours of gameplay with huge textures and voice acting and multiplayer and a feature-length making of movie into a single sided DVD (gotta save pennies on the cost!) and make it use no more than a gigabyte of RAM.
It'll come down to if Apple did their due diligence in research beforehand. Considering Proview Electronics and Proview Technology are both owned by Proview International, I can see why Apple thought they were in the clear. Now, years after the iPad was announced and launched, they want their pay day. I think the courts will find that the company acted in bad faith and doesn't get a dime.
America: Sending a bunch of people to college to get better at their jobs and make this company awesome will hurt next quarter's balance sheet, which will all be blamed on me. Fire them all and replace them with migrant workers that don't speak English! Even if the company crashes a day after the quarter is over, at least I'll look good for a few minutes!
Europe: This company is going to be around for the long haul, so might as well continue being awesome.
This. It is a fundamental flaw in the way we do business here in the United States, and it should be fixed. I don't think you could fix it easily by just, say, making people that hire contractors responsible for the fuck ups of the contractors though. It would have to be something else, something with real teeth. Perhaps the owners of the company could be sentenced to the rest of their lives making a paltry wage and cleaning up their mess, paid for out of selling off the company's assets. When they run out, they work for free, living in a tent on the property.
The entire idea is to discourage the irresponsibility by making it an awful scenario. We have to live with a superfund site while you get off with as much money as you can stuff into your briefcase? Nope!
Who are you going to jail? Do you pierce the corporate veil and order the person that signed off on it? They'll just point to their boss who ordered them to do it or they'd be fired. If you say they shouldn't have complied, there's 10,000 people waiting just outside the building to fill in their position when they get fired. If you go for the boss they'll point to their boss, right up to the CEO who simply gave the vague order to profit.
But the very problem with corporations is that they want to be treated like people when it benefits them, and they want to be faceless hoards when it benefits them. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
We have to decide, now, what a corporation is. We need strict definitions. We need to decide if we want to pierce the corporate veil and go after the people that ordered it, the people that carried it out, the whole corporation, upper management, or any combination of the above. If we do nothing, the corporations will continue to expand their powers. Before long, we won't be able to do anything at all, because they'll own the government.
Piracy is a socioeconomic problem, not a technological one.
Piracy exists for several reasons. One is that games are just too damn expensive and throwaway for some people. If I pay $60 for something I expect it to bring me at least $60 in value. Often times in the past I've bought a game for $60 that doesn't provide even HALF that, either due to bugs, or it just being a shitty game. I'm now very reluctant to pay $60 for a game I haven't seen the reviews on, but will happily pirate a game to try out and then go buy it if it doesn't make me put it down after ten minutes due to being a piece of shit or nto even running right.
Another is that games are released in different places at different times. Why should people in England have to wait three months after a game is released here in America for reasons of bureaucratic bullshit? Now the people can sidestep all that bureaucracy and get what they want NOW rather than whenever someone decides to stop piddlefarting around and port a game to the same goddamn language.
Yet another reason for piracy is someone not making enough money to play a game, but they want it anyway. This isn't necessarily as harmful as game companies think, since 90% of these people wouldn't be buying the game anyway. If anything, it HELPS them in the long run because it establishes brand value. How would Starcraft had done as a competitive game if it hadn't been massively pirated overseas?
I bought Section 8 and have played it all of twice because Games for Windows Live is a piece of shit that is down half the time, slow, likes to give random mysterious errors, and randomly brings up windows in the back ground that makes my full screen game minimize. I will never own another game that uses GFWL.
The problem is that this licensing shit went to their heads. Instead of it just being, "This is a license for you to install this game and play it." it went to, "This is a license for you to install this game and play it, here are a bunch of terms you have to agree to above and beyond copyright laws.", and then, "This is a license for you to install this game and play it, here are a bunch of terms you have to agree to above and beyond copyright laws, and also you're limited to only a few activations and playing the game while you're online."
Some corporate software has been licensed and tied to specific hardware, and Ubisoft wants to get in on the action. Honestly, if it were up to software vendors, we'd be paying $10/hr just to play their games, and probably additional fees if we wanted to see the ending or use multiplayer.
I certainly agree that employees that use their vacation days are at a disadvantage. Who are you more likely to promote? Joe Schmoe who 'abandons his post' for two weeks a year, or John Doe who hasn't taken so much as a sick day in ages and never takes vacation? You don't have to cross-train someone to hold down John's side of the fort for a week or two at a time, so promoting him will save you a few man-hours of time in the future. In the mean time, you'll keep telling Joe he can't take vacation because someone else on the far other end of the vacation always has the two weeks he wants reserved off....
In some cultures, you show how awesome you are by inconveniencing as many people as possible. It isn't unusual for someone to flat out park in the middle of a busy street, lock up, and walk into a shop. Thankfully they keep each other in check because someone will eventually be along that doesn't care to get a new dent in their bumper and will simply push the car off the road or otherwise mangle it.
A certain section of people here in the US do similar things, only not quite as illegal. I watched seven people at a table the other day all change their orders over and over every time a waiter came back to their table, and ended up leaving a bunch of non-restaurant trash on their table when they left..no tip, of course. Their bill was over $100 and they shorted the place on that too.
Auto-pay is hilarious. All my friends have had trouble with it but continue to use it. "Oops, my mistake!" they say after they plunder your bank account for $500 because they billed it multiple times. "Here's your $500 back, less the bill you owed..and you're still in the red because your bank hit you with a couple of overdraft charges!"
Hydrazine is pretty bad but it isn't THAT bad. This isn't nerve gas. You would know if you inhaled even a small amount pretty rapidly by the running nose, sore throat, dizziness, seizures, etc...
"Welcome to your first day at the office. What kind of computer will you be bringing in to do your work on? You're only allowed to buy from Dell from this short line. Also mention our company code when you buy so they can confirm with us that you purchased. Failure to buy from Dell means immediate termination. Also, here are some great offers from our partners."
Accepting the patch: Can still play on network Can play the latest games Cannot use Other OS.
Not accepting the patch: Cannot still play on network May not be able to play the latest games Can use Other OS
All three conditions were advertised, and thus all three conditions should be delivered. That's like me coming to your house after you bought a car from my dealership and telling you that I'm going to take either the tires or the doors because i want to sell them to someone else for extra money. It was right there in your contract, I can do whatever I want to your car after you purchase it, and you can't stop me.
You can pretty easily prevent jury nullification by ensuring that your jury is comprised of only the most ignorant people that answer the selection questions favorably enough that you can subconsciously feed them a verdict before they even deliberate at the end of the trial.
For example: Using definitive words. The defendant murdered the woman. When the defendant entered the house. When the defendant stabbed his wife. When the defendant buried her. Etc. Sometimes a judge will pick up on them and shoot it down, but many times they do not.
Or simply allowing the brainwashed to convict based on faulty evidence because the crime was so bad. Example: I don't want drug dealers hanging around on the street corner near my house, do you? The defendant was clearly about to set up shop. What else could you do with an entire GRAM of marijuana?? Why, after even smoking a little bit of it for 'personal consumption' you would no longer be allowed to drive or do many other things because you would be so impaired!
It isn't evil. Corporations exist to make money. Therefore, they'll make money however they can. This is entirely allowed by our patent system and isn't evil at all. Neither is faking a pass and then running the ball right down the middle.
Dickish? Sure. Deceptive? Absolutely. People won't think Apple were the ones suing all the Android manufacturers. But wouldn't YOU like to get paid for all the sales your competitors get? I would. But therein lies the reason I'm not a business man: I don't have the balls to pull stunts like this and profit at any cost.
Marilyn had a good body size and shape. Weight is irrelevant. I've seen women that weigh 130lbs and have an unsightly gut, or nearly 200 and were just tall, broad, and certainly attractive. And I'm totally not into bigger girls. Proportions mean a lot more than just weight.
I usually look when the light turns green to make sure no one is about to run it. I have a similar accuracy in determining when I shouldn't cross because someone is going a little too fast. I don't think it's the speed, because some people like locking up their brakes at the last second. I think even those people have their foot on the break and are ready to stop. Whereas runners won't be decelerating much or if at all, and may not even be looking at the red light. Just imagine you're driving on a straight flat piece of land through a green light. That's what those drivers will do. That kind of behavior. Only the light is red. If you watch for it, you'll see it every time.
My issue with this technology is that the dumber types will pick it up and think that the same idea can also be used to catch speeders, drunk drivers, etc, etc. So they'll demand those systems be built and offer stupid amounts of money for it to happen. When it does happen, and it just might, the accuracy will be low, but you'll still have to go to court to fight your way out of a DUI because the computer said you swerved more than a few inches once. They already managed to get the field sobriety test approved, which most people fail SOBER, especially beside a busy interstate in the cold at night with all those bright lights buzzing past at 70mph. You fail a field sobriety test, you're drunk. Period.
Back when I was younger, I used to go to LAN parties all the time. Typically with friends, at their place, but twice I went to a big LAN party. In each of the big LAN parties, the drama was almost more overwhelming than the BO. It was like being in a room full of three-days-unbathed tween drama queen girls that were obese and all used to being the center of their own worlds. Tempers flared easily when no one was around to bring everyone snacks and drinks and take away their piss jugs.
And the thievery. God Jesus did shit ever get stolen. Dozens of people got their shit stolen at both of the big LAN parties I went to. Apparently some shady people would show up with shitty computers, set up a place, and then go around looting. No one would ever think to stop them from walking out with a computer or hardware, because people were doing it all the time. Oh, and the poopsockers. You couldn't play a strategy game without being cheesed to death immediately at the beginning of the game. People with superior skills would send a worker unit over to harass and maybe kill your guys before you could get a soldier out, and then thirty seconds later be in your base with late game units. Oh, and the cheating. People wouldn't admit that their 100% headshot rate and 100:0 kill/death ratio was fake. When they did, cue drama and usually violence.
In short, fuck big LAN parties. They have none of the charm of the small group gaming sessions, and all of the downsides of playing with a bunch of socially inept nerds with strange senses of humor.
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The issue is that if you find a way to level the playing field, someone will learn to play the game better than everyone else and you're right back to where you started. Companies used to exploit workers because you had to work somewhere if you wanted to survive and there were few laws against it. They used to rule with iron fists, threatening to fire people at every turn, or straight up beating them or subjecting them to other inhumane treatment.
Then the law stepped in with a new civilized way of handling matters. Now you have to take your disputes to court, they said, where a judge can enact justice! Here are new laws to go by. As a result, companies still exploit workers and rule with iron fists backed up by massive legal departments and boatloads of money instead of a few strong guys that don't care to beat the shit out of you.
There's a little coffee shop near campus that has excellent coffee and wonderful food. I've eaten there twice since I started going to school years ago. Why? Because people will go in, order a cup of coffee that costs a dollar, then unpack all their stuff into seats by them, their laptop, a keyboard, a mouse, their books, their umbrella, the lunch they packed, and their mp3 player. Then they'll sit there for four hours while they do their homework, taking up enough space for FIVE people, on a single dollar. Then they'll pack up and leave. Won't even tip.
Regardless, outlets aren't the best way to do this. Maybe a good nonconfrontational way, but not the best. The best way is to have a sign posted, and proactively kick people out that don't limit themselves to an hour or so. Maybe make a 'ten bucks unlimited coffee all day' deal.
CompUSA: 40GB Western Digitial Hard Drive, 7200 RPM: $250.
Newegg: 40GB Western Digital Hard Drive, $65.
BestBuy: GeForce 250 Video Card: $199
Newegg: GeForce 250 Video Card: $80 with $20 rebate
Walmart: 1TB External USB Drive: $129.99
Newegg: 1TB External USB Drive: $129.99
Even fucking Walmart has a clue when it comes to computer parts, how come the other stores couldn't? I understand margins are low, but margins are even lower if not many people buy from there.
This might work for Blockbuster Video, but I would be PISSED if I spent hours of my life troubleshooting and trying to get some part to work for my PC and found out that it was returned defective, remarked, and put on the shelf. At that point I'd be asking for compensation for my time and effort, since they knowingly and willingly tried to put a defective product for sale. Or hey, we can go to small claims court for theft by deception..
Great for the MBA that has slightly better sales than they would have, bad for the company who is going to get sued one day for false advertising, which will become a class action because everyone is going to want a piece of the pie. In the end, the company will pay out a few hundred grand to lawyers and some coupons to people that were inconvenienced..because most people won't be able to prove how much they got overcharged.
Maybe this is the marketing engine revving up for someone's 'next generation' product. The base model will start off real cheap. Maybe $100 for a launch product. The launch day games will be playable. A few months later, hey, you require 2GB of RAM to play this and only have one. You zip to your local Walmart and find that the extra gigabyte of slow ConsoleRAM is another $100, when you paid that much for four gigabytes of fast PC RAM a year prior. I bet you want Wireless G or N for that too, don't you?
We let everyone access our console by making them cheap! It's totally up to you whether you want to pay the latest and greatest! If not, you can stick to the games that came out last year, but we might even release a patch that makes them require new hardware.
See, this was thought up by a marketing genius. Absolute genius, I tell you. Why don't most people buy consoles more often? A big initial investment for little initial return. You pay $299 for a console, a controller, and a game. A single game. In essence, that game cost you $299. Reduce that to less than the cost of two games alone, and you've got a whole open market. It would also bring PC-style bragging rights into the modern arena. My Console has twelve gigabytes of RAM and a $500 video card, obviously your Console with only four gigabytes and a $200 video card bogs down on Quake 1. It would also take pressure off developers when it comes to optimization. They don't have to sit there for months and take shit from the art department, telling them that they gotta squeeze forty hours of gameplay with huge textures and voice acting and multiplayer and a feature-length making of movie into a single sided DVD (gotta save pennies on the cost!) and make it use no more than a gigabyte of RAM.
It'll come down to if Apple did their due diligence in research beforehand. Considering Proview Electronics and Proview Technology are both owned by Proview International, I can see why Apple thought they were in the clear. Now, years after the iPad was announced and launched, they want their pay day. I think the courts will find that the company acted in bad faith and doesn't get a dime.
America: Sending a bunch of people to college to get better at their jobs and make this company awesome will hurt next quarter's balance sheet, which will all be blamed on me. Fire them all and replace them with migrant workers that don't speak English! Even if the company crashes a day after the quarter is over, at least I'll look good for a few minutes!
Europe: This company is going to be around for the long haul, so might as well continue being awesome.
This. It is a fundamental flaw in the way we do business here in the United States, and it should be fixed. I don't think you could fix it easily by just, say, making people that hire contractors responsible for the fuck ups of the contractors though. It would have to be something else, something with real teeth. Perhaps the owners of the company could be sentenced to the rest of their lives making a paltry wage and cleaning up their mess, paid for out of selling off the company's assets. When they run out, they work for free, living in a tent on the property.
The entire idea is to discourage the irresponsibility by making it an awful scenario. We have to live with a superfund site while you get off with as much money as you can stuff into your briefcase? Nope!
Who are you going to jail? Do you pierce the corporate veil and order the person that signed off on it? They'll just point to their boss who ordered them to do it or they'd be fired. If you say they shouldn't have complied, there's 10,000 people waiting just outside the building to fill in their position when they get fired. If you go for the boss they'll point to their boss, right up to the CEO who simply gave the vague order to profit.
But the very problem with corporations is that they want to be treated like people when it benefits them, and they want to be faceless hoards when it benefits them. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
We have to decide, now, what a corporation is. We need strict definitions. We need to decide if we want to pierce the corporate veil and go after the people that ordered it, the people that carried it out, the whole corporation, upper management, or any combination of the above. If we do nothing, the corporations will continue to expand their powers. Before long, we won't be able to do anything at all, because they'll own the government.
Piracy is a socioeconomic problem, not a technological one.
Piracy exists for several reasons. One is that games are just too damn expensive and throwaway for some people. If I pay $60 for something I expect it to bring me at least $60 in value. Often times in the past I've bought a game for $60 that doesn't provide even HALF that, either due to bugs, or it just being a shitty game. I'm now very reluctant to pay $60 for a game I haven't seen the reviews on, but will happily pirate a game to try out and then go buy it if it doesn't make me put it down after ten minutes due to being a piece of shit or nto even running right.
Another is that games are released in different places at different times. Why should people in England have to wait three months after a game is released here in America for reasons of bureaucratic bullshit? Now the people can sidestep all that bureaucracy and get what they want NOW rather than whenever someone decides to stop piddlefarting around and port a game to the same goddamn language.
Yet another reason for piracy is someone not making enough money to play a game, but they want it anyway. This isn't necessarily as harmful as game companies think, since 90% of these people wouldn't be buying the game anyway. If anything, it HELPS them in the long run because it establishes brand value. How would Starcraft had done as a competitive game if it hadn't been massively pirated overseas?
I bought Section 8 and have played it all of twice because Games for Windows Live is a piece of shit that is down half the time, slow, likes to give random mysterious errors, and randomly brings up windows in the back ground that makes my full screen game minimize. I will never own another game that uses GFWL.
The problem is that this licensing shit went to their heads. Instead of it just being, "This is a license for you to install this game and play it." it went to, "This is a license for you to install this game and play it, here are a bunch of terms you have to agree to above and beyond copyright laws.", and then, "This is a license for you to install this game and play it, here are a bunch of terms you have to agree to above and beyond copyright laws, and also you're limited to only a few activations and playing the game while you're online."
Some corporate software has been licensed and tied to specific hardware, and Ubisoft wants to get in on the action. Honestly, if it were up to software vendors, we'd be paying $10/hr just to play their games, and probably additional fees if we wanted to see the ending or use multiplayer.
I certainly agree that employees that use their vacation days are at a disadvantage. Who are you more likely to promote? Joe Schmoe who 'abandons his post' for two weeks a year, or John Doe who hasn't taken so much as a sick day in ages and never takes vacation? You don't have to cross-train someone to hold down John's side of the fort for a week or two at a time, so promoting him will save you a few man-hours of time in the future. In the mean time, you'll keep telling Joe he can't take vacation because someone else on the far other end of the vacation always has the two weeks he wants reserved off....
In some cultures, you show how awesome you are by inconveniencing as many people as possible. It isn't unusual for someone to flat out park in the middle of a busy street, lock up, and walk into a shop. Thankfully they keep each other in check because someone will eventually be along that doesn't care to get a new dent in their bumper and will simply push the car off the road or otherwise mangle it.
A certain section of people here in the US do similar things, only not quite as illegal. I watched seven people at a table the other day all change their orders over and over every time a waiter came back to their table, and ended up leaving a bunch of non-restaurant trash on their table when they left..no tip, of course. Their bill was over $100 and they shorted the place on that too.
Auto-pay is hilarious. All my friends have had trouble with it but continue to use it. "Oops, my mistake!" they say after they plunder your bank account for $500 because they billed it multiple times. "Here's your $500 back, less the bill you owed..and you're still in the red because your bank hit you with a couple of overdraft charges!"
Hydrazine is pretty bad but it isn't THAT bad. This isn't nerve gas. You would know if you inhaled even a small amount pretty rapidly by the running nose, sore throat, dizziness, seizures, etc...
"Welcome to your first day at the office. What kind of computer will you be bringing in to do your work on? You're only allowed to buy from Dell from this short line. Also mention our company code when you buy so they can confirm with us that you purchased. Failure to buy from Dell means immediate termination. Also, here are some great offers from our partners."
Accepting the patch:
Can still play on network
Can play the latest games
Cannot use Other OS.
Not accepting the patch:
Cannot still play on network
May not be able to play the latest games
Can use Other OS
All three conditions were advertised, and thus all three conditions should be delivered. That's like me coming to your house after you bought a car from my dealership and telling you that I'm going to take either the tires or the doors because i want to sell them to someone else for extra money. It was right there in your contract, I can do whatever I want to your car after you purchase it, and you can't stop me.
You can pretty easily prevent jury nullification by ensuring that your jury is comprised of only the most ignorant people that answer the selection questions favorably enough that you can subconsciously feed them a verdict before they even deliberate at the end of the trial.
For example: Using definitive words. The defendant murdered the woman. When the defendant entered the house. When the defendant stabbed his wife. When the defendant buried her. Etc. Sometimes a judge will pick up on them and shoot it down, but many times they do not.
Or simply allowing the brainwashed to convict based on faulty evidence because the crime was so bad. Example: I don't want drug dealers hanging around on the street corner near my house, do you? The defendant was clearly about to set up shop. What else could you do with an entire GRAM of marijuana?? Why, after even smoking a little bit of it for 'personal consumption' you would no longer be allowed to drive or do many other things because you would be so impaired!
It isn't evil. Corporations exist to make money. Therefore, they'll make money however they can. This is entirely allowed by our patent system and isn't evil at all. Neither is faking a pass and then running the ball right down the middle.
Dickish? Sure. Deceptive? Absolutely. People won't think Apple were the ones suing all the Android manufacturers. But wouldn't YOU like to get paid for all the sales your competitors get? I would. But therein lies the reason I'm not a business man: I don't have the balls to pull stunts like this and profit at any cost.
Marilyn had a good body size and shape. Weight is irrelevant. I've seen women that weigh 130lbs and have an unsightly gut, or nearly 200 and were just tall, broad, and certainly attractive. And I'm totally not into bigger girls. Proportions mean a lot more than just weight.
I usually look when the light turns green to make sure no one is about to run it. I have a similar accuracy in determining when I shouldn't cross because someone is going a little too fast. I don't think it's the speed, because some people like locking up their brakes at the last second. I think even those people have their foot on the break and are ready to stop. Whereas runners won't be decelerating much or if at all, and may not even be looking at the red light. Just imagine you're driving on a straight flat piece of land through a green light. That's what those drivers will do. That kind of behavior. Only the light is red. If you watch for it, you'll see it every time.
My issue with this technology is that the dumber types will pick it up and think that the same idea can also be used to catch speeders, drunk drivers, etc, etc. So they'll demand those systems be built and offer stupid amounts of money for it to happen. When it does happen, and it just might, the accuracy will be low, but you'll still have to go to court to fight your way out of a DUI because the computer said you swerved more than a few inches once. They already managed to get the field sobriety test approved, which most people fail SOBER, especially beside a busy interstate in the cold at night with all those bright lights buzzing past at 70mph. You fail a field sobriety test, you're drunk. Period.
Back when I was younger, I used to go to LAN parties all the time. Typically with friends, at their place, but twice I went to a big LAN party. In each of the big LAN parties, the drama was almost more overwhelming than the BO. It was like being in a room full of three-days-unbathed tween drama queen girls that were obese and all used to being the center of their own worlds. Tempers flared easily when no one was around to bring everyone snacks and drinks and take away their piss jugs.
And the thievery. God Jesus did shit ever get stolen. Dozens of people got their shit stolen at both of the big LAN parties I went to. Apparently some shady people would show up with shitty computers, set up a place, and then go around looting. No one would ever think to stop them from walking out with a computer or hardware, because people were doing it all the time. Oh, and the poopsockers. You couldn't play a strategy game without being cheesed to death immediately at the beginning of the game. People with superior skills would send a worker unit over to harass and maybe kill your guys before you could get a soldier out, and then thirty seconds later be in your base with late game units. Oh, and the cheating. People wouldn't admit that their 100% headshot rate and 100:0 kill/death ratio was fake. When they did, cue drama and usually violence.
In short, fuck big LAN parties. They have none of the charm of the small group gaming sessions, and all of the downsides of playing with a bunch of socially inept nerds with strange senses of humor.