yes, it's so bad that people pay their monthly fees and spend thousands of hours leveling their characters. just a terrible game indeed.

wrong. MMOs are all about your place respective to other players. how do you think it makes the non-cheating customers feel if they spend 5000 hours leveling their character but someone else does it in 10 hours of screen time with a bot? you think it makes the vast majority of paying customers feel good about the game? like they want to keep devoting their precious time and money?

this is nothing more than keeping the vast majority of the paying customer base happy. and yeah, it's a money grab because as soon as the average person feels the game is overrun with bots, they stop paying.

what costs do those monthly fees go toward, pre-profit? bandwidth. electricity. maintenance. etc. all of those costs get multiplied by bots. humans don't play for weeks straight. a bot is a net loss for the company.

people seem to forget that just because it's digital doesn't mean it's without operating costs.

it's all about having an advantage. bots exists to gain an advantage. if everyone is a bot, it defeats the point.

not to mention, bots put excessive load on their servers beyond what would be possible with a human player.

oh man, that's so intense. i can't believe you had the guts to say it! damn. just .... damn.

on my nexus, i can disable any (firmware) app. note that you can't disable non-firmware apps, simply because you have the option of uninstalling them.

so, then why'd you buy a samsung product? people keep complaining about things like this, but then they go out and support products that implement such restrictions. lesson learned?

it's trivial to root most phones, and easier than trivial for Google's branded Nexus line.

Please post some references. Thanks.

It's since 4.0. You can't uninstall them completely without reflashing the firmware that doesn't contain them. They are part of the firmware image.

You can disable any app, even those in the firmware. When disabled, the app no longer shows in your launcher and cannot run, ever. Yes, the bits are still present in the firmware read-only partition.

completely misunderstanding the problem. the fear is that if iran gets nukes, they'll supply smaller groups that can't be retaliated against without massive collateral damage (not that you can ever avoid collateral damage with nukes).

e.g., a nuke is launch from the mountains around the pakistan / afghan border. what do you do? nuke pakistan?

i think it's well and truly clear that i didn't say anything about legality. i said it's a difficult technical challenge.

what way?

what feature?

why would i, as a developer, care if i could install a custom firmware? wouldn't i want to be testing my game on the firmware that's going to be run by 99.999% of users?

really, i'm asking.

it's a massive engineering effort, and they admit as much in the article. even if you 98% of the things working, the last 2% is going to cause unacceptable app crashes.

think about the engineering effort to take the entire iOS *and* Android SDK, plus the Google APIs, and make them all work with MSFT. that's not just string manipulations, it's all of the APIs that connect to cloud services, sensors, and so on.

because they are also providing MSFT implementations of the Google APIs which of course are not open source. should be easy enough. e.g., provide a maps implementation that works exactly like Google maps.