Events: 1. User buys license entitling him to use software.
2. User breaches agreement and loses license to use the software.
That is almost entirely the definition of an unconscionable contract - I pay you money, you are contractually obligated to provide me with the license I paid for unless you decide that I don't deserve it? No, that's completely unfair.
The summary does indeed make it sound as if the guy was banned from playing a game that was already installed and running, thus being banned from using something already in his possession. After all, there is a login screen in the game. There is a bit difference between being barred from downloading something and being barred from actually using it after it was purchased and installed.
He was also barred from playing saved games from DA:O, because they used DLC and you must log in to your EA account to play saved games that use DLC.
So yes, he was both banned from downloading a game he'd bought, and also from playing saved games from a game that was already up and running.
He's also banned from playing his saved games from the previous game, because you must be logged in to your EA account to use saved games containing DLC and his EA account is banned.
The receiver may need to have a database of tower locations, the towers would need to send out a ID signal, but with that I figure the accuracy would be damn good. As a long time inactive pilot I have not seen the inside of a GA airplane, but more and more panels are phasing out dials and nav radios.
As long as you're hard-coding an ID signal, why not have them send out their exact position too? After all, GPS works most of the time, so there's no reason not to set the cell's current location using it. No frequently updated database needed in devices, no need for device providers to interoperate with carriers.
And people still don't bother most of the time; so the tech is still useful.
For example, forensic fingerprinting technology is defeated by wearing gloves, but that hasn't rendered the technology irrelevant either.
Exactly - it means we still only catch the lazy criminals.
My wife watches a lot of those "true crime" TV shows - like Snapped - and invariably the narrative goes something like "police gave up for five months, until the suspect came in and confessed" or "police had no leads, until the suspect's neighbor turned in a gun he'd found while mowing the lawn".
And that's just the cases where the police officially realize that there's a crime in the first place, and don't just assume it's a suicide or something because there's less paperwork that way.
Seriously, if crime was actually as much of a problem as the media seems to want us to believe, we'd all be screwed because our police forces are woefully equipped to actually solve crimes more complicated than "gee officer, I don't know why my cheating husband is dead and there's a right-angled poker with my fingerprints on it next to his corpse". Good thing we live in a mostly civilized country, in a mostly civilized world, and most serious crimes are crimes of passion.
Prohibition is necessary in the case of hard drugs. Its true that we need to attack it from all angles, but legalization and taxation of most of the illegal drugs would be a societal disaster the scale of which we have never seen.
What, why? What's wrong with doing (e.g) cocaine, exactly? All sorts of businessmen and entertainers and other powerful people do it on a regular basis, without significant side-effects; because it's illegal, you only hear about the people who crash and burn because of it, not the people who keep it in check.
I mean, seriously, we can get a good idea of how much cocaine is being used, even if (because it's illegal, obvs) we can't track actual rates. The NDIC claims that there's roughly 300 metric tons of cocaine available in the USA annually - and you can bet that a significant portion of that gets used. If cocaine is so dangerous, and people are using so much of it, where are all the cocaine addicts who burn out and need to be treated? Sure, there are some, but not significantly more than any other legal drug like alcohol or tobacco.
Our current "hard drug" policy is like basing alcohol policy on surveys of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and temperance groups. What we need are reality-based policies, not these bullshit wish-based policies we have right now.
I still don't see how this is any different than, say, traveling to a Mediterranean country and discovering that everyone has dinner at 8:00 PM (current time!) and everything closes down around noon for a little bit. It's a different country, things are going to be different, you just have to deal with it. I don't think the position of the clock is as big of an issue as you're making it out to be.
If we wanted rehabilitation, we wouldn't keep electing politicians who run on "tough on crime" platforms even after the number of prisoners in the United States is about the same as the population of Houston, Texas.
Now, instead of setting your watch and waiting for jet lag to run it's course, you now have to re-wire your brain to continuously remember to eat lunch at 1pm, not supper and that bedtime is somewhere around midnight.
It's not like you're going to be flying to another country and then living in a well-lit bubble. You'll eat lunch when your hosts offer lunch or when you get hungry; you'll go to bed when it gets dark and you get tired; you'll set your alarm to wake you up an hour or so before your first scheduled meeting or tour or what have you, or not set an alarm at all if that's how you like to vacation. Our dumb little brains are great at picking up environmental cues, especially giant obvious ones like "it's dark outside" and "I'm hungry".
Seriously, this post just makes me worry about you. Would you really go to pieces and not know when to eat or when to sleep if you didn't have a clock?
So? It is easier to fashion a raw material into something acceptable, than to delete it outright and expect someone else to re-do the work later.
Deletionists literally say "this is so irredeemably stupid that nobody will ever want for there to be an article about it in Wikipedia; therefore, we should delete this article".
While this may occasionally be true, in practice it gets used way, way too often.
Wikipedia needs more internal bickering, not snide remarks on the outside. You, you reading this, are the potential source of that bickering.
Okay, let's test this hypothesis.
Let's say I hear about Old Man Murray getting deleted from Wikipedia for not being notable. I feel incensed, because this is absolutely fucking retarded - that's like deleting the entry on the Encyclopedia Britannica, since nobody ever cites it as a source.
So I go, log in to my rarely-used Wiki account or just create a new one outright, and post something about it - "bicker", as you say.
Immediately, I get called a "meatpuppet", because my account is either new or not very active. My opinion is dismissed, because clearly I was just called in on this one topic and therefore I am a sub-human piece of shit that is ruining the Wiki.
Great. So I say fuck you Wikipedia, and my chances of ever editing an article go down even further.
See, you say that Wikipedia needs new users, but when new users come to Wikipedia about a topic like this, their opinions are dismissed because (inevitably) they have a single issue that they actually care about, and that issue is firmly squashed on the grounds that these people are new. WTF?
More like "Number 1 with people who have no other choice" - Microsoft will occasionally cut a deal with large organizations if they'll force the browser search provider to be Bing.
So - it would be interesting to see a breakdown of where the Bing IP addresses are coming from. Are they mostly from residential areas, where people presumably have a choice in the matter? Or are a lot of them from corporate IP addresses, where people might have less of a choice?
It would be fun to see those stats, but I doubt it would be at all legal.
That's the main thing people don't seem to understand about computer science as it is practiced in the real world.
We're not about making awesome computer stuff for the goal of making awesome computer stuff. We're, essentially, about making the most fantastically flexible and capable tools human kind has ever invented.
But what good is a tool that requires six fingers to use?
Personally, I think that in the future "computer science" won't really be a separate field of endeavor - like walking or throwing a ball or writing a report, it'll just be something people do without spending too much time thinking about it.
It lends credibility to the (false) notion, so common among average users, that you're either a completely unskilled newbie or a serious expert who can discern the inner workings of the mysterious black box.
How is that false? In Windows, moving beyond the pretty clicky clicky click interfaces is deep, dark fucking Voodoo that nobody actually understands! There are no serious experts in Windows.
I mean for instance: at my last job, the domain server was going crazy. I wasn't a sysadmin, so I didn't fix it, but I did spend a couple of long nights helping the guy who did - and he was convinced it was because our desktop imaging procedure (which he had written, natch) didn't include changing the desktop computer SIDs so we had to go around one night and run NewSID on every single computer in the company.
And then, like six months later, Mark Russinovitch himself says that in fact Windows doesn't actually use the client SID for anything, and it's totally okay to not change it - and in fact, they've deprecated NewSID for that very reason.
So yeah, even people who are theoretically Windows "experts" - even Mark Russinovich, who supposedly understood Windows so much better than anyone at Microsoft that it got him hired there - don't really know how Windows works. What sort of a chance does anyone else have?
Well the thing is, a whole lot of people can nominate almost anything for the Nobel Peace Prize - just look at who's eligible to submit a nomination on Wikipedia:
* Members of national assemblies and governments and members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union,
* Members of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Court of Justice at the Hague,
* Members of Institut de Droit International,
* University professors of history, political science, philosophy, law and theology, university presidents and directors of peace research and international affairs institutes,
* Former recipients, including board members of organizations that have previously won the prize,
* Present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and
* Former permanent advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Institute.
The two I bolded represent a while shitload of people, of whom there are certainly a number of cranks. Nobel Peace Prize nominations are basically meaningless.
if you need "I need folks who are able to hit the ground running" you don't hire new graduates you hire old hands who have a few years of experience.
Exactly! You know what "hit the ground running" requires? Money. If you're not willing to pay for it, don't make it a requirement.
I want a job that's ten minutes from my house and offers an awesome salary, but I'd have to compromise on at least one of those; just because you're on the other side of the interview desk doesn't mean you suddenly get to have everything you want.
IT managers need to get real. The chances that they'll actually find a candidate with real expertise in PHP, RoR, Python, MySQL, Oracle, Apache, Cisco, JavaScript, jQuery, UI/UX, Photoshop, and Flash is pretty slim (yes, I saw that just the other day).
Of course they won't find anyone with all those skills! That's the whole point, after all.
You submit your resume anyway, they interview you as a favor to you... and then when it comes time to negotiate a salary, they'll say "Oh, well, since you don't meet all of the requirements for the position we'll start out paying you (say) 10% less than the advertised salary - but don't worry, if things work out and you can pick up those new technologies, you'll get a raise!"
Of course, this just means that you start out working at 90% under wage, and then maybe over the course of several years you might potentially get back to the 100% wage they initially advertised.
Employers agree that colleges and universities need to provide their students with the essential skills required to run IT departments...
Translation: "Why can't I pay fresh college graduate rates for someone who does the job of an experienced sysadmin?"
Reason: because fresh college graduates are not experienced, since douchebags like you collectively refuse to hire anyone who doesn't have four years experience in everything.
And to be honest, it kind of makes sense from their perspective - they could hire a guy fresh out of college, invest a couple of years in training him, and then watch him fly away to a better position somewhere else. For some reason, people just don't stick around when their skills grow, but their position and compensation doesn't! How weird!
Employee retention? Internal promotions? What's this madness you speak of?
The DA saw I had a spotless record, and gave me a deal where I paid a lesser fine, and no offense was reported in my name provided I was not pulled over again in their county for at least 1 full year. I took that deal because I didn't want to go back there, and have never been in that county since.
Well yeah, of course he'd do that - if the ticket wound up in front of a judge, you wouldn't have paid anything. This way, the county got some money and you got less hassle. Broken windows stimulate the economy, after all!
"as much as" is one of those awesome Humpty Dumpty phrases that doesn't mean much. It's like how stores have signs saying "Up to 80% off!" - except the only item that's actually 80% off is some piece of shit that was overpriced in the first place and is sold out already anyway.
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That is almost entirely the definition of an unconscionable contract - I pay you money, you are contractually obligated to provide me with the license I paid for unless you decide that I don't deserve it? No, that's completely unfair.
He was also barred from playing saved games from DA:O, because they used DLC and you must log in to your EA account to play saved games that use DLC.
So yes, he was both banned from downloading a game he'd bought, and also from playing saved games from a game that was already up and running.
He's also banned from playing his saved games from the previous game, because you must be logged in to your EA account to use saved games containing DLC and his EA account is banned.
So: working as intended, I presume.
But I thought the hedgehog can't never be buggered at all?
As long as you're hard-coding an ID signal, why not have them send out their exact position too? After all, GPS works most of the time, so there's no reason not to set the cell's current location using it. No frequently updated database needed in devices, no need for device providers to interoperate with carriers.
... what? We democratically vote for representatives in the electoral college, and that's "our government not being a representative democracy"?
What madness is this?
That's okay though, I have access to a device that can generate sufficiently uniform random numbers between 0 and 2.
Exactly - it means we still only catch the lazy criminals.
My wife watches a lot of those "true crime" TV shows - like Snapped - and invariably the narrative goes something like "police gave up for five months, until the suspect came in and confessed" or "police had no leads, until the suspect's neighbor turned in a gun he'd found while mowing the lawn".
And that's just the cases where the police officially realize that there's a crime in the first place, and don't just assume it's a suicide or something because there's less paperwork that way.
Seriously, if crime was actually as much of a problem as the media seems to want us to believe, we'd all be screwed because our police forces are woefully equipped to actually solve crimes more complicated than "gee officer, I don't know why my cheating husband is dead and there's a right-angled poker with my fingerprints on it next to his corpse". Good thing we live in a mostly civilized country, in a mostly civilized world, and most serious crimes are crimes of passion.
Not only that, but the Russian Orthodox Church announced that Stalin was "the divinely anointed leader of our armed and cultural forces leading us to victory over the barbarian invasion" after he abolished the League of the Godless in 1942. He may have been an atheist, but he had the willing support of the Christian Church in Russia.
What was that saying about good men doing nothing again?
What, why? What's wrong with doing (e.g) cocaine, exactly? All sorts of businessmen and entertainers and other powerful people do it on a regular basis, without significant side-effects; because it's illegal, you only hear about the people who crash and burn because of it, not the people who keep it in check.
I mean, seriously, we can get a good idea of how much cocaine is being used, even if (because it's illegal, obvs) we can't track actual rates. The NDIC claims that there's roughly 300 metric tons of cocaine available in the USA annually - and you can bet that a significant portion of that gets used. If cocaine is so dangerous, and people are using so much of it, where are all the cocaine addicts who burn out and need to be treated? Sure, there are some, but not significantly more than any other legal drug like alcohol or tobacco.
Our current "hard drug" policy is like basing alcohol policy on surveys of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and temperance groups. What we need are reality-based policies, not these bullshit wish-based policies we have right now.
I still don't see how this is any different than, say, traveling to a Mediterranean country and discovering that everyone has dinner at 8:00 PM (current time!) and everything closes down around noon for a little bit. It's a different country, things are going to be different, you just have to deal with it. I don't think the position of the clock is as big of an issue as you're making it out to be.
Vengeance, duh.
If we wanted rehabilitation, we wouldn't keep electing politicians who run on "tough on crime" platforms even after the number of prisoners in the United States is about the same as the population of Houston, Texas.
It's not like you're going to be flying to another country and then living in a well-lit bubble. You'll eat lunch when your hosts offer lunch or when you get hungry; you'll go to bed when it gets dark and you get tired; you'll set your alarm to wake you up an hour or so before your first scheduled meeting or tour or what have you, or not set an alarm at all if that's how you like to vacation. Our dumb little brains are great at picking up environmental cues, especially giant obvious ones like "it's dark outside" and "I'm hungry".
Seriously, this post just makes me worry about you. Would you really go to pieces and not know when to eat or when to sleep if you didn't have a clock?
So? It is easier to fashion a raw material into something acceptable, than to delete it outright and expect someone else to re-do the work later.
Deletionists literally say "this is so irredeemably stupid that nobody will ever want for there to be an article about it in Wikipedia; therefore, we should delete this article".
While this may occasionally be true, in practice it gets used way, way too often.
Okay, let's test this hypothesis.
Let's say I hear about Old Man Murray getting deleted from Wikipedia for not being notable. I feel incensed, because this is absolutely fucking retarded - that's like deleting the entry on the Encyclopedia Britannica, since nobody ever cites it as a source.
So I go, log in to my rarely-used Wiki account or just create a new one outright, and post something about it - "bicker", as you say.
Immediately, I get called a "meatpuppet", because my account is either new or not very active. My opinion is dismissed, because clearly I was just called in on this one topic and therefore I am a sub-human piece of shit that is ruining the Wiki.
Great. So I say fuck you Wikipedia, and my chances of ever editing an article go down even further.
See, you say that Wikipedia needs new users, but when new users come to Wikipedia about a topic like this, their opinions are dismissed because (inevitably) they have a single issue that they actually care about, and that issue is firmly squashed on the grounds that these people are new. WTF?
More like "Number 1 with people who have no other choice" - Microsoft will occasionally cut a deal with large organizations if they'll force the browser search provider to be Bing.
So - it would be interesting to see a breakdown of where the Bing IP addresses are coming from. Are they mostly from residential areas, where people presumably have a choice in the matter? Or are a lot of them from corporate IP addresses, where people might have less of a choice?
It would be fun to see those stats, but I doubt it would be at all legal.
That's the main thing people don't seem to understand about computer science as it is practiced in the real world.
We're not about making awesome computer stuff for the goal of making awesome computer stuff. We're, essentially, about making the most fantastically flexible and capable tools human kind has ever invented.
But what good is a tool that requires six fingers to use?
Personally, I think that in the future "computer science" won't really be a separate field of endeavor - like walking or throwing a ball or writing a report, it'll just be something people do without spending too much time thinking about it.
Plant fibers are funny things - they technically ignite at ~400 C, but if you some oily, it'll go up in flames at ~120 C.
Accidentally spill enough pizza grease on your cardboard computer over the years? That might be a merry bonfire just waiting to happen.
How is that false? In Windows, moving beyond the pretty clicky clicky click interfaces is deep, dark fucking Voodoo that nobody actually understands! There are no serious experts in Windows.
I mean for instance: at my last job, the domain server was going crazy. I wasn't a sysadmin, so I didn't fix it, but I did spend a couple of long nights helping the guy who did - and he was convinced it was because our desktop imaging procedure (which he had written, natch) didn't include changing the desktop computer SIDs so we had to go around one night and run NewSID on every single computer in the company.
And then, like six months later, Mark Russinovitch himself says that in fact Windows doesn't actually use the client SID for anything, and it's totally okay to not change it - and in fact, they've deprecated NewSID for that very reason.
So yeah, even people who are theoretically Windows "experts" - even Mark Russinovich, who supposedly understood Windows so much better than anyone at Microsoft that it got him hired there - don't really know how Windows works. What sort of a chance does anyone else have?
Well the thing is, a whole lot of people can nominate almost anything for the Nobel Peace Prize - just look at who's eligible to submit a nomination on Wikipedia:
The two I bolded represent a while shitload of people, of whom there are certainly a number of cranks. Nobel Peace Prize nominations are basically meaningless.
Exactly! You know what "hit the ground running" requires? Money. If you're not willing to pay for it, don't make it a requirement.
I want a job that's ten minutes from my house and offers an awesome salary, but I'd have to compromise on at least one of those; just because you're on the other side of the interview desk doesn't mean you suddenly get to have everything you want.
Of course they won't find anyone with all those skills! That's the whole point, after all.
You submit your resume anyway, they interview you as a favor to you... and then when it comes time to negotiate a salary, they'll say "Oh, well, since you don't meet all of the requirements for the position we'll start out paying you (say) 10% less than the advertised salary - but don't worry, if things work out and you can pick up those new technologies, you'll get a raise!"
Of course, this just means that you start out working at 90% under wage, and then maybe over the course of several years you might potentially get back to the 100% wage they initially advertised.
Translation: "Why can't I pay fresh college graduate rates for someone who does the job of an experienced sysadmin?"
Reason: because fresh college graduates are not experienced, since douchebags like you collectively refuse to hire anyone who doesn't have four years experience in everything.
And to be honest, it kind of makes sense from their perspective - they could hire a guy fresh out of college, invest a couple of years in training him, and then watch him fly away to a better position somewhere else. For some reason, people just don't stick around when their skills grow, but their position and compensation doesn't! How weird!
Employee retention? Internal promotions? What's this madness you speak of?
Well yeah, of course he'd do that - if the ticket wound up in front of a judge, you wouldn't have paid anything. This way, the county got some money and you got less hassle. Broken windows stimulate the economy, after all!
"as much as" is one of those awesome Humpty Dumpty phrases that doesn't mean much. It's like how stores have signs saying "Up to 80% off!" - except the only item that's actually 80% off is some piece of shit that was overpriced in the first place and is sold out already anyway.