Ubisoft can't be responsable for people not reading what's in front of them.
In most jurisdictions they can be, at least with consumer contracts (e.g. the Unfair Consumer Contracts Regulations 1994 which apply throughout the whole of the EU, which supplement numerous national protections such as the Unfair Contract Terms Act in the UK). It always strikes me as amazing that software companies somehow believe (god knows where they take their legal advice) these laws don't apply to them and that disclaimers of liability will actually work. I'm not saying that Ubisoft's EULAs necessarily fall within the UCCR or UCTA but I am saying that it's simply not the case that a company can say it's not liable for damage just because an exclusion clause is tucked away in a EULA (or even printed on the box). They may not like, you may not like it; but in many jurisidictions this is the law and companies who operate in those jurisdictions should be aware of it and comply.
And this is without getting into the implied terms regarding merchantability and fitness for purposes which are inserted into most consumer contracts under the various Sale of Goods Acts.
I don't think it was the sample rate he was questioning (in fact many SACDs, and certainly those with 5.1 surround, are 24/96 discs). He was claiming the Direct Stream Digital (DSD - as used in SACD) is inherently inferior to Pulse Code Modulation (PCM - as used in CD, DVD-A and DVD-V, in fact the DVD-V standard does include a 24/96 PCM standard which has been rarely used - special edition versions of Neil Young's Greatest Hits and Prairie wind (the former of which would only output a down sampled 16/48 stream via S/P DIF)).
This is interesting as, although I don't know enough about the technology to comment myself, I do know that heated debate has taken place on this point in various UK Hi-fi magazines (or used to, before they were all rebranded as home cinema magazines...)
My complaint to Sony have really neglected me as a customer.
Damn right. They don't think things through at all either. In the last 10 years I've had five Sony MD players (one of the orginal S/PDIF only units, a couple of NetMDs, a Hi-MD and a rack size unit I foolishly bought back in 1998 - it still sits in my rack, I don't think it's been switched on in 5 years) and, because my CDs had mostly been ripped to ATRAC to be transferred to NetMD, the MZ-HD1 hard disc Walkman.
Last week I finally bought an iPod. The catalyst for this was that, upon upgrading my PC, I discovered that my ripped music collection, despite being backed up to an external HD, could not be copied back to my new PC because of the DRM Sony applied to MY CDs. So I figured if I was going to have to spend months re-ripping my collection I could at least learn from my mistake and shift to a DRM free portable format.
In my conversations with Sony technical support about this I could not understand why they would set up their proprietary formats in such a way that even long time users would be presented with the opportunity to (and caused so much inconvenience they would be strongly incentivised to) switch formats when changing their kit.
Orignal MDs had to be dumped to computers via S/PDIF which meant no faster than realtime
This was actually fixed pre Hi-MD with the NetMD players that used original MD but could be connected to a PC (as well as S/PDIF recording). These had OMG Jukebox as the software, which was even worse than SonicStage if you can believe that (amongst other things it applied DRM to your own CDs preventing you from exporting each track more than 3 times).
If you think there were no weapons of mass destruction why do you suppose Saddam kept stalling the UN inspectors over all those years?
Because he massively miscalculated in believing that giving the impression of having WMDs would deter Western attack?
Because he genuinely believed he had WMDs while his cronies had in fact been siphoning off the budget for them for the past 10 years?
Because he was a sociopath who refused to acknowledge reality?
Whatever impression Saddam gave, the fact remains no WMD have been found, which means either that there really were none in the first place or they were smuggled out despite the war (making the whole invasion and occupation an even of an exercise in futility than it currently appears to be). Anyway I thought we'd moved on from Saddam's WMD as the justification for the invasion. In the UK at least we're told it was all about liberating the Iraqi people and bringing them the benefits of democracy...
The reason a lot of law firms stuck with Wordperfect for so long is that it was (and quite probably still is for all I know) far better at handling long legal documents with lots of complicated paragrah numbering schemes and automatic cross referencing. In Word numbering systems and formating regularly become corrupt for no apparent reason on opening a document. The number of (very expensive) man hours we have to spend manually checking and correcting this sort of thing is quite phenomenal.
However, I'm not sure that your information is up to date. Certainly all the large City of London firms now use Word (my firm, one of the world's biggest, switched in 1999) and in all my dealings with Wall Street firms drafts are always emailed over as Word documents. We were forced to change as emailing replaced faxing/couriering as the primary means of distributing drafts and we found our clients could only open (and hence demanded) Word documents.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
on
Region-free PS3
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· Score: 1
The PS2 is (even in unmodified PAL form). I very much doubt the PS3 will be different, especially as it's going to be a Blu-ray player (and, anyway, in the HD era will the PAL/NTSC still be of much significance?)
Under English law (and that of other jurisdictions) exclusions of liability for death or physical injury are void (it's quite funny, sometimes, to go through consumer level EULAs which purport to be governed by English law and spot all the things a first year law student could tell you wouldn't be enforceable, I don't know where the software companies get their legal advice but I am very sure that few of them ever take any real local advice, they just change the governing law clause and hope for the best).
I don't know US law in this area (and I imagine consumer protection statutes differ between states) but I really can't believe those sort of EULA exclusions would be 100% effective in a country where the tort laws apparently allow you punitive damages for pouring boiling hot coffee on your own crotch.
1. My understanding is you do not play as the bully but the victim.
2. We have a legally enforcable age rating system for games in the UK which seems to work reasonably well and, to some extent, has taken the heat out of the violent games debate over here (San Andreas is rated 18, so Hot Coffee just wasn't an issue). Isn't the problem with introducing a similar age rating regimen in the US the fact that Walmart (and possibly other stores) will refuse to stock adult rated games thus effectively preventing their distribution and making them uneconomic to develop. I may be mistaken as I don't live in the US to find out first hand, but it's always seemed to be this, rather than any point of principle, which causes the game industry to object to so strongly to age rating laws over there. If the retailers would be a little more reasonable maybe this wouldn't be such an issue?
Not only are Edge's previews notably well written, willing to offer constructive criticism and objective they will follow games through the development process (subject, I guess, to developer co-operation) and list any previous issues of Edge in which the game has been featured. Allowing you to trace their evolving view on a game.
The GamesTM preview section isn't bad either, although I have noticed it becoming a little more "gushy" recently
I just tried to buy the game, for precisely the same reasons and the fact that it sounds like my sort of thing, from the Game at Canary Wharf. When I complained to the (clearly hungover and possibly stoned) clerk about him putting his fingers all over the discs (in a polite yet irritated tone, certainly no swearing or raising of voice) he said I was being rude and refused to serve me. At noon on a Sunday, of course, the main manager isn't in yet so I had no come back.
The power of the video game store clerk... I'm sure his mother is very proud.
Re:This Year's Interactive Achievement Award Winne
on
The Videogame Oscars
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· Score: 1
We love Katamari best childrens' game? I think that shows how seriously we should take these awards.
Another similar theory (which I found quite amusing - while hastening to add that I am quite aware it is basically BS, has no evidence to support it and is not very credible) is that an alien race with an extremely long time horizon looks for planets which are capable of sustaining life (for the sake of argument say planets on which water is in liquid form), seeds them with bacteria or RNA strands or whatever then sits back for a couple of hundred million years while an ecosystem evolves so there's plenty for them to eat and hydro-carbons to use (for plastics if not fuel) when they get here. Obviously there's a risk that intellegent life will evolve and use all these resources before they arrive but if they've seeded plenty of planets this shouldn't be too much of a set-back for them. They just eliminate the infestation, leave things to recover and go somewhere else for now.
True, but emotional damage from bad relationship decisions is just part of growing up and hardly restricted to e-dating. It's just the underage sex that's illegal.
Don't know about the Godfather (and I have low expectations) but Black got a very positive review from Edge this month (the only source whose reviews I trust) and I'm planning to get it when released in the UK on Friday. Unfortunately the price cut doesn't seem to apply to Europe as web sites are still quoting the MRP as £39.95.
Yeah, it sounds like they're saying we need to purchase one license to play it on our home CD player and another to put it on our iPod. The peutlance of a business refusing to accept that it's days of setting the pop cultural agenda are over and that selling music just isn't as profitable as they would like it be...
I'm not saying it will work, I agree that it won't. But, as with the drugs parallel, it will lead to lot of heavy handed policing and the wrecking of lives of people who really haven't ever hurt anybody to "save" society from a perceived evil.
No, but they can make it illegal to posess, sell, import or produce them. It's just a question of extending the "obscenity" laws. I'm not saying it's right (I think it's very, very wrong) but it's how it will happen in at least some countries I think.
Which was in an incredibly stupid place for left handers. I can't be the only one who kept accidentally turning the thing off during particularly frantic moments in Meteos and Zoo Keeper.
You ask, "...is the argument supposed to be that if you can have violence in games then it's fair play?" I think that's a fair statement. You have rape in movies, why not games? You depict child abuse in books, why not games? The line drawn by the Jack Thompson crowd these days is "It's different because games are interactive. You are the killer. You become the rapist." If you buy that line, it's just as applicable to killing as it is to rape.
I think the point is that with games (and movies) which involve killing it's possible to construct stories which justify the killing (you're a soldier serving your country, a cop defending the innocent, a HazMat scientist with a crow bar etc). The vast majority of games, whatever Jack Thompson and others may think, do this. I'm finding it impossible to think of circumstances where a story can justify rape or torture without making you unambiguously the bad guy. You say that rape and child abuse are portrayed in movies and this is true to some extent but they are never portrayed in a positive light as something the hero would do (well duh!) whereas he or she can kill (if properly justified in story terms of course) without people objecting.
As for freedom of speech and double standards between games and movies I'm not sure that's true since in most western countries (and I believe this applies equally in the US, first amedment notwithstanding) ban pornographic movies which depict simulated rape, torture and murder. Given the new UK regulations on sexually abusive material viewed over the internet this game could actually be illegal here (depending on how it's been implemented).
If you really believe that I suggest you do some research into what an "anger-excitation" rapist is and what they tend to do to their victims. You'll learn a lot of things you'll probably wish you hadn't but I suspect your views on appropriate treatment will change.
Is it actually illegal to slander in the US now (as opposed to giving rise to a civil action for damages for defamation)? And I thought UK defamation laws were bad...
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In most jurisdictions they can be, at least with consumer contracts (e.g. the Unfair Consumer Contracts Regulations 1994 which apply throughout the whole of the EU, which supplement numerous national protections such as the Unfair Contract Terms Act in the UK). It always strikes me as amazing that software companies somehow believe (god knows where they take their legal advice) these laws don't apply to them and that disclaimers of liability will actually work. I'm not saying that Ubisoft's EULAs necessarily fall within the UCCR or UCTA but I am saying that it's simply not the case that a company can say it's not liable for damage just because an exclusion clause is tucked away in a EULA (or even printed on the box). They may not like, you may not like it; but in many jurisidictions this is the law and companies who operate in those jurisdictions should be aware of it and comply.
And this is without getting into the implied terms regarding merchantability and fitness for purposes which are inserted into most consumer contracts under the various Sale of Goods Acts.
This is interesting as, although I don't know enough about the technology to comment myself, I do know that heated debate has taken place on this point in various UK Hi-fi magazines (or used to, before they were all rebranded as home cinema magazines...)
Last week I finally bought an iPod. The catalyst for this was that, upon upgrading my PC, I discovered that my ripped music collection, despite being backed up to an external HD, could not be copied back to my new PC because of the DRM Sony applied to MY CDs. So I figured if I was going to have to spend months re-ripping my collection I could at least learn from my mistake and shift to a DRM free portable format.
In my conversations with Sony technical support about this I could not understand why they would set up their proprietary formats in such a way that even long time users would be presented with the opportunity to (and caused so much inconvenience they would be strongly incentivised to) switch formats when changing their kit.
This was actually fixed pre Hi-MD with the NetMD players that used original MD but could be connected to a PC (as well as S/PDIF recording). These had OMG Jukebox as the software, which was even worse than SonicStage if you can believe that (amongst other things it applied DRM to your own CDs preventing you from exporting each track more than 3 times).
Mentions it in the BBC news story. Second paragraph. And the stroy announcing the change. Which site are you involved with? I guess you'd better get on to Chart track, they're going to be p***ed with you... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4870150.s tm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4689838.s tm
Because he massively miscalculated in believing that giving the impression of having WMDs would deter Western attack?
Because he genuinely believed he had WMDs while his cronies had in fact been siphoning off the budget for them for the past 10 years?
Because he was a sociopath who refused to acknowledge reality?
Whatever impression Saddam gave, the fact remains no WMD have been found, which means either that there really were none in the first place or they were smuggled out despite the war (making the whole invasion and occupation an even of an exercise in futility than it currently appears to be). Anyway I thought we'd moved on from Saddam's WMD as the justification for the invasion. In the UK at least we're told it was all about liberating the Iraqi people and bringing them the benefits of democracy...
Also weren't L3 and R3 only introduced for the Dual Shock 2 (i.e. the PS2 version of the controller) so never used for PSOne games?
However, I'm not sure that your information is up to date. Certainly all the large City of London firms now use Word (my firm, one of the world's biggest, switched in 1999) and in all my dealings with Wall Street firms drafts are always emailed over as Word documents. We were forced to change as emailing replaced faxing/couriering as the primary means of distributing drafts and we found our clients could only open (and hence demanded) Word documents.
The PS2 is (even in unmodified PAL form). I very much doubt the PS3 will be different, especially as it's going to be a Blu-ray player (and, anyway, in the HD era will the PAL/NTSC still be of much significance?)
I don't know US law in this area (and I imagine consumer protection statutes differ between states) but I really can't believe those sort of EULA exclusions would be 100% effective in a country where the tort laws apparently allow you punitive damages for pouring boiling hot coffee on your own crotch.
2. We have a legally enforcable age rating system for games in the UK which seems to work reasonably well and, to some extent, has taken the heat out of the violent games debate over here (San Andreas is rated 18, so Hot Coffee just wasn't an issue). Isn't the problem with introducing a similar age rating regimen in the US the fact that Walmart (and possibly other stores) will refuse to stock adult rated games thus effectively preventing their distribution and making them uneconomic to develop. I may be mistaken as I don't live in the US to find out first hand, but it's always seemed to be this, rather than any point of principle, which causes the game industry to object to so strongly to age rating laws over there. If the retailers would be a little more reasonable maybe this wouldn't be such an issue?
The GamesTM preview section isn't bad either, although I have noticed it becoming a little more "gushy" recently
The power of the video game store clerk... I'm sure his mother is very proud.
We love Katamari best childrens' game? I think that shows how seriously we should take these awards.
Another similar theory (which I found quite amusing - while hastening to add that I am quite aware it is basically BS, has no evidence to support it and is not very credible) is that an alien race with an extremely long time horizon looks for planets which are capable of sustaining life (for the sake of argument say planets on which water is in liquid form), seeds them with bacteria or RNA strands or whatever then sits back for a couple of hundred million years while an ecosystem evolves so there's plenty for them to eat and hydro-carbons to use (for plastics if not fuel) when they get here. Obviously there's a risk that intellegent life will evolve and use all these resources before they arrive but if they've seeded plenty of planets this shouldn't be too much of a set-back for them. They just eliminate the infestation, leave things to recover and go somewhere else for now.
True, but emotional damage from bad relationship decisions is just part of growing up and hardly restricted to e-dating. It's just the underage sex that's illegal.
Don't know about the Godfather (and I have low expectations) but Black got a very positive review from Edge this month (the only source whose reviews I trust) and I'm planning to get it when released in the UK on Friday. Unfortunately the price cut doesn't seem to apply to Europe as web sites are still quoting the MRP as £39.95.
Yeah, it sounds like they're saying we need to purchase one license to play it on our home CD player and another to put it on our iPod. The peutlance of a business refusing to accept that it's days of setting the pop cultural agenda are over and that selling music just isn't as profitable as they would like it be...
I'm not saying it will work, I agree that it won't. But, as with the drugs parallel, it will lead to lot of heavy handed policing and the wrecking of lives of people who really haven't ever hurt anybody to "save" society from a perceived evil.
No, but they can make it illegal to posess, sell, import or produce them. It's just a question of extending the "obscenity" laws. I'm not saying it's right (I think it's very, very wrong) but it's how it will happen in at least some countries I think.
Which was in an incredibly stupid place for left handers. I can't be the only one who kept accidentally turning the thing off during particularly frantic moments in Meteos and Zoo Keeper.
Or, indeed, with the Uncertainty Principle. It does, after all, implicitly deny God's omniscience...
I think the point is that with games (and movies) which involve killing it's possible to construct stories which justify the killing (you're a soldier serving your country, a cop defending the innocent, a HazMat scientist with a crow bar etc). The vast majority of games, whatever Jack Thompson and others may think, do this. I'm finding it impossible to think of circumstances where a story can justify rape or torture without making you unambiguously the bad guy. You say that rape and child abuse are portrayed in movies and this is true to some extent but they are never portrayed in a positive light as something the hero would do (well duh!) whereas he or she can kill (if properly justified in story terms of course) without people objecting.
As for freedom of speech and double standards between games and movies I'm not sure that's true since in most western countries (and I believe this applies equally in the US, first amedment notwithstanding) ban pornographic movies which depict simulated rape, torture and murder. Given the new UK regulations on sexually abusive material viewed over the internet this game could actually be illegal here (depending on how it's been implemented).
If you really believe that I suggest you do some research into what an "anger-excitation" rapist is and what they tend to do to their victims. You'll learn a lot of things you'll probably wish you hadn't but I suspect your views on appropriate treatment will change.
Is it actually illegal to slander in the US now (as opposed to giving rise to a civil action for damages for defamation)? And I thought UK defamation laws were bad...