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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for posting these.

Still too many rules for my taste. (Google also has too many rules, FWIW.)

Instead of just saying too many rules, do you have points in the list that you object to? One of the problems with rejection until now was the lack of specific guidelines about what would be rejected. It seems to me that a comprehensive document would unavoidably have many rules, and the prohibitions that I read seemed reasonable.

The tipping point was "no card counting". While card counting may be against the rules at a particular casino, it's not illegal in general and does not belong in the "legal" section.

Whenever Apple is confronted with a situation where the user could use a feature or tool for something that's "against the rules", they tend to disable the feature. See, for example, iTunes' inability to import music from an iPod. It could be 100% legal for me to do that, but Apple doesn't provide that feature, even though iTunes "knows" how to do it.

(I stopped using Apple products about 5 years ago when they added PT_DENY_ATTACH.)

> I stopped using Apple products about 5 years ago when they added PT_DENY_ATTACH.

You mean the ptrace() flag that's trivial to bypass? Been a while since I dealt with it, but ISTR it's as simple as:

    br ptrace
    commands
    ret
    cont
    end

Counting cards by using just your brain is legal. But using a device is illegal in many places, like Nevada.

I think the number of rules reflects the ultimate simplicity of it. Rather than referencing 9 things to see if it's legal, simply go down it as you would a checklist.

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