cp702

Wait, WHAT!!???!?!?! That is pretty much the single worst possible legal regime that is imaginable. I guess the one consolation is that police depriving someone of their civil rights is also a federal crime, which doesn't depend on states. However, I'd need a citation on any claim that it's legally impossible to prove a cop in NM committed assault, because that's just asking for massive federal lawsuits.

If a cop is off-duty and unarmed, he probably shouldn't be taking part in law enforcement actions. For one thing, I'm pretty sure cops tend to only carry police ID if they also carry a gun, and without ID, they'll have a hard time convincing people they're a cop.

My basic view is that most cops try to do good most of the time. Removing "most" in either place, or removing "try", makes the statement false. Cops are people, and have human failings; they are often placed in situations where the proper action is not pretty, and looks bad on video. That doesn't matter; I expect police to maintain a higher standard. While police brutality is generally over-exaggerated online, it is generally massively under-reported in real disciplinary records and court proceedings. Many corners of the Internet view any use of force as unjustified; with humans placed in stressful situations, some leniency has to be given. However, there is currently far, far too much.

Police are held to a higher standard. Does that mean you should be a jerk to random cops? I don't think so, but that's because I prefer not to be a jerk to random people in general. But just because I think you shouldn't, doesn't mean I won't defend your freedom to do so without official retaliation, or that I think there's some sort of moral deficiency in you (I just wouldn't hang around people who enjoy being jerks). Yes, the internet can take things to unjustified extremes (e.g. Reddit, where the prevailing view seems to be that being a police officer should be a capital crime). That doesn't mean that there's a problem; people are perfectly allowed to take things to unjustified extremes. I think the view that there should be no cops is silly, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be allowed to have it (and I don't think that copblock would say that if you press them; generally, organizations like this say that police should respect the limits on their power, and should demilitarize, but they still view some sort of law enforcement as something that must be done). And police are not exempt from laws saying that you can shoot in self-defense. You are legally allowed to resist unlawful arrest. The only issue with doing so is that a) cops have more and bigger guns, b) courts will almost always take the cop's side, no matter what, c) the cops may not let you reach court alive if you try to escape unlawful arrest, and d) you don't necessarily know if an arrest is unlawful (if the police have probable cause or an arrest warrant, you can be arrested even if you did nothing wrong; that's why we have a "trial", to tell if the arrested person actually *did* commit a crime, and why arrests aren't considered evidence of wrongdoing).

People have a First Amendment right to be jerks in public. This doesn't just include being jerks to cops, it ESPECIALLY includes being jerks to cops. As long as they don't actually impede police work, there's nothing they're doing wrong. Filming police at work should be a constitutional right.

Metropolitan Police and Fire and EMS are paid by the DC local government, which has a contingency fund that they're using to continue full operations despite the federal shutdown (it's a complicated interplay, where DC has some local powers but Congress still has essentially full control). Every single FBI Special Agent is considered "essential", as is 92% of the Secret Service (and I assume the 8% who aren't are civilian employees, not so much the sworn agents and UD officers). Even when the government shuts down, law enforcement and public safety generally stay running; in '95, when the DC government did shut down, the only people who still came to work were police, fire, and EMS.

Yes, there are some cases where equipment specs should be confidential. For example, details about the armor on US Army M1 tanks is highly classified, as are operational specs for American submarines. That doesn't apply here. All these things are special-built, and generally restricted to government use. In contrast, firearms police employ are not built for police use; they are available, in general, to anyone who wants them. Furthermore, knowing specific weapon models doesn't give much advantage over knowing weapon *types*, and weapon types are most certainly public knowledge - if the police use rifles, that's not a secret fact. Secrecy makes sense when the things being kept secret would cause harm if disclosed. Tactics police use can fall under that category. Exotic equipment, maybe (I could see the police preferring to keep confidential details on the capabilities of an armored vehicle). But police firearms are not exotic. Answer me this: How would it cause an issue if criminals knew exactly what weapons the police carry? Where would that lead to problems?

Nope. This is a matter of public knowledge, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be discussed.

I'd be more likely to blame budget/oversight. However, it certainly isn't related to specs - aesthetics != graphics, and this is an aesthetic choice.

GTA IV doesn't work like, say, Saints Row 2 (which I bring up b/c I rediscovered it last week and it's awesome). Clothing is pre-modeled; you can't, within the confines of the game, take the lower from one model and the upper from another - you have to go outside the game to do that. To actually make a new belt, you have to model it yourself; the belt isn't separate from the pants, it's part of the same mesh. While you could combine the police upprs with the SWAT lowr, or with other lowrs like policeman123's with Taser, that can't be done ingame with a script. LCPDFR is generally designed to work with preexisting game resources, and the only content edit it makes is the Taser. Unless there's an extremely compelling reason to have something for which there is no acceptable ingame model (e.g. Taser), we're not making model edits. While better MP support is a good suggestion, I'm sorry to inform you that as long as LCPDFR is computer code written by humans, there will always be the possibility of crashes, glitches, and bugs. We can try to minimize them, but there will always be bugs.

He's making a suggestion; LCPDFR does not allow you to edit what weapons NOoSE carries.

If you're playing IV with police3 added through modding, you can't make the police computer work. It only works on TBOGT.

Wait, is this an EU registration? What I said applies to US trademark law, but I can't speak to European law. Also, if this is a Steam Box launch game, it probably means Steam Box will come out in ~5 years. This is Valve, remember. If they say it'll come out in a year, you know it won't.

The pullover system is integrated with LCPDFR; just pulling a car to the side of the road isn't as useful. For example, if you want the suspect to run and start a chase, you'd have to either talk to LCPDFR or implement your own chase system from scratch. Since you can't talk to LCPDFR, you'd have to reimplement it, and that's hard. Compare that to the tow truck mod, which doesn't have to integrate much with LCPDFR: there aren't chases or anything, it doesn't have to communicate with FR. An API is in development for 1.0 (so this might be possible), but that depends on what, exactly, the API contains.

First, this is trademark law, not copyright law. They're extremely different on the details; they aren't even handled by the same offices (trademark is the USPTO, copyright is the Copyright Office). Second, they *don't* technically need to register it. There are some benefits to a registered trademark, but they mostly just involve proving your ownership nationwide and making it easier to win lawsuits around it. There is no requirement to registration to legally use a trademark, and many trademarks are unregistered. Even if Steam had its own policies about registering trademarks for games published there, Valve can ignore any Steam rules they want (seeing as it's their product). So, I'd say that this is most likely something Valve's business or legal department recommended they do to deter people from using variants of HL3; it's not like trademarks are *that* expensive to register. Now, it could be that they're doing this to prepare for an announcement. That is quite possible. But it could also easily be that they want some extra protection.

I was going to repeat that the mod focuses on being a beat cop, but Sam tells me that I should really say that the mod focuses on mechanics, and generally leaves missions up to you. Plus, 1.0 will have an API, so you can make your own callouts.

Does "San Andreas" here mean GTA SA, or the SA in V?

That's not normally a task for beat cops. Again, LCPDFR simulates a beat cop. It is not designed to simulate special units, and special police units won't generally be found in the mod.

This. In fact, based on how red-green colorblindness works genetically, your colorblindness has zero impact on your sons' color vision (the gene is on the X chromosome; girls have an X chromosome from both mother and father, but boys only inherit the chromosome from their mothers - the father's X chromosome doesn't matter for sons.

If you're in the UK, I'd listen to the UK people more. Standards vary by region. I'd call some UK agencies' recruiting people and ask. They'd know for sure.

Road width refers to the width of the whole road, and is most often expressed as a number of lanes. *Lane* width is the width of the lanes, and is what DOT regulates. If you refer to anything as "road width" except the width of the entire road, don't be surprised when people misinterpret what you're saying. Also, I still fail to see what being "consoly" has to do with porting.

On meeting people: Even if I happened to be in Edinburgh and Sam asked to meet me, I'd say "no" and be kinda weirded out. And I actually know Sam's real name, and trust him. After a fair amount of experience meeting people on Facebook before meeting them in real life (like for summer programs), I found that someone's online persona can't give you a guide to their real-life persona. Even if I think I know someone based on Facebook interaction (where there's less incentive to distort, because we're meeting regardless), I find that the first hour with them wipes away everything I knew.

If I had to fill out paperwork, I would just turn my suspects over to Officer Glock.

Actually, I don't think a Rockstar dev who wants to make a multiplayer mode can do whatever he wants (edit cars, peds, etc.) For one thing, they want it to look like the rest of the game. Almost all the models, if not all, should be in the game already; things should generally act as they do in the game. The script provides a framework, but micro-scale actions are generally unchanged. Also, I'm not sure a dev has the *authority* to do this stuff. Generally, things like this (especially of the scale of GTA) have huge teams; the people making MP missions aren't modelers, they're game designers. They might be able to request some degree of tweaking, but I assume they need a reason before a modeler is paid to create the model. I assume that they normally are supposed to work within the limitations and produce a script that uses preexisting resources wherever possible. If they have a really really really super duper good reason, one that would make Rockstar enough money to buy the actual city of LA, then they could probably get a rework of the actual engine. Rockstar sure as hell isn't going to let you tweak the engine, so it's clearly not "anything we *could* do, you can do". I doubt there'll be a way to edit models; I'd imagine Rockstar uses expensive professional modeling and animation software, and saying "you can do what you want provided you spend thousands of dollars" [yes, that's what professional software often costs] sounds stupid. Also, remember that Microsoft (at least, not sure about Sony) puts extremely strict rules on modding. Rockstar has to work within this framework; they can't run the risk of getting users banned for doing what they were told they can do. I'd guess what you do is upload it to RGSC from a computer, unless there's an ingame interface (which seems quite possible). If I had to bet, I'd guess either: some sort of scripting interface, which lets you spawn and control preexisting resources, but doesn't have a way to make new ones. You'd upload to RGSC, then you could select them ingame, at which point it'd download them from Rockstar servers. Alternatively, there may be a point-and-click thing, maybe even ingame, that would provide a *user-friendly* way of doing this. In short, exactly like other games with user-created levels.

Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh, not Canada. Rockstar Toronto just *ported* IV and EFLC, it didn't do the main development (actually, R* Toronto's main role within R* is porting, it looks like). That said, I'm not sure why they *couldn't* port it; while consoles are optimized differently from general-purpose computers, and a PC version would require debugging, it's not like those are unique concerns to GTA V. Style of a game doesn't matter for difficulty of the port; for example, in all likelihood, the handling isn't something that porters have to *touch* - they'd need to port the general handling system, but the actual handling data is separate. Also, since RAGE was already ported with IV and Max Payne 3, they already have much of that work done. Obviously, they'd need to update RAGE, but it's not like they're starting from scratch. About scale: New York has fairly small roads. Out west, roads are often bigger: there are stretches of highway with 10 or more lanes. Also, what does "consoly" even mean?