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by gavaw 1120 days ago
Is it shipped if it cannot execute under any conditions? Philosophical question I'm afraid.
3 comments

The code? Yes

The feature? No

The company that makes GTA was sued for content that was not accessible in the game.
Anybody can sue anyone for anything. I could sue Rockstar for not having enough nudity in GTA; that does not imply guilt or lawbreaking on their part.

The suit you mentioned was settled out of court for a tiny amount, basically nuisance value, with no finding or admission of wrongdoing.

They probably shouldn't have?
> could have become reactivated later by the change of a single byte in an installed system.

Is that not a condition under which it could be executed?

Only if the application has code to change that byte. “It could be changed by a patch” doesn’t count as a condition under which it could be executed, because a patch can make any change it wants to. You wouldn’t say “there’s a condition under which Windows will wipe your hard drive and every visible network share” just because someone can write code to do that.