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Humble Bundle Launches Online Store For Games
sfcrazy writes "Humble Bundle has opened an online store called Humble Store, an extension of the sales system developed for managing the Humble Bundles. That puts Humble Bundle in the same league of Valve's Steam which sells works online via Steam Store. Humble Store, will continue the organization’s legacy of supporting causes. 'The Humble Store is a permanent addition to our Humble site that will allow our customers to buy great games at great prices 24/7 and support charity with every purchase. Ten percent of all purchases will go to vital causes like American Red Cross, Child’s Play, Electronic Frontier Foundation, World Land Trust and charity:water.'"
I was on the humble store not that long ago looking at games. They were overpriced and i left. Now they are launching it?
The Humble Store is not competing with Steam. Most games that it sells can/have to be activated on Steam.
I must have over one hundred games in my Steam library that come from the Humble Bundle.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
Pls lern 2 rite sumari guise.
It seems that Steam is closer and closer to getting their lunch eaten. More sites are offering better classic games and with Amazon in on the fray it's only going to become tougher for Steam. I haven't bought a boxed game in years and lived on Steam exclusively about 18 months ago but today I hardly ever go into Steam. Aside from HalfLife 3 I just don't see much going on there that I can't get somewhere else.
Steam better hope that people migrate to SteamBox and that PS4 and XBO fail or they're going to be a second rate player in the market in a couple years.
It will be interesting to see if this move will impact future bundles. I am curious if they will be willing to cannibalize their own store sales, and if other vendors might be less willing to work with them now that they have a permanent store (and might be viewed as a competitor).
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Only the store is donating to Red Cross. You can continue buying bundles, since they tell you exactly who it's going to for each sale.
Your link says in no uncertain terms: "Unfortunately, documentary evidence is incomplete and leaves room for uncertainty"
That's not really persecution there... Being able to skip-out on blood drives and ditch military conscription seem like POSITIVES to me.
Now, if they wouldn't give TRANSFUSIONS *to* gay men, that would be something different entirely.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Am I the only one that laughed when I saw vital causes next to American Red Cross, Child’s Play, Electronic Frontier Foundation, World Land Trust and charity:water?
the current justification by the FDA is that removing this barrier and allowing those groups to donate blood would result in an increase in HIV-positive transfusions in .0000000016% of the blood supply. You be the judge there.
Ok.
There's a statistically higher number of gay men and africans with AIDS.
There's a percentage of blood that slips through quality control and doesn't get tested.
Globally around 85 million units of red blood cells are transfused in a given year.
Cite the 0.0000000016%, otherwise I believe you're pulling a number out of your ass.
Hey, did you know that, in the past and currently, there were complete asshats that did asshat-like things who were part of the gay community, the church, open-source movement, BSA, childsplay, England, AnimalAid, academia, and/or $YOURFAVORITEORGANIZATION?
What exactly do you expect them to have done? Send one of their armored divisions to overthrow Hitler?
Because federal law won't let them.
There is a lot more wrong with the group than just that. And I'm not too crazy about the other groups either. Quite frankly, I would be willing to pay more if I knew that none of the money was going to these "charities". That doesn't seem to be an option, but not buying is.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
currently humblebundle.com/store doesn't load in my linux distro using firefox (24.1.0 esr) and for the past few weeks the weekly and bundle pages haven't worked properly either, i can see the advertised games but the javascript for selecting the payment amount doesn't work, once purchased (using firefox on windows vm) the download page won't respond to clicks to show steam keys or select bittorrent, merely scrolling to the top of the page if not already there. i emailed support, they recommend using a different browser, well konqueror doesn't work either (always used to along with firefox) and i'm not installing a browser specially for one web site
snake
Also from the WHO site:
25 countries are not able to screen all donated blood for one or more of the above infections. [HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and syphilis]
24% blood donations in low-income countries are not screened following basic quality procedures which include documented standard operating procedures and participation in an external quality assurance scheme.
The prevalence of transfusion-transmissible infections (TTIs) in blood donations in high-income countries is considerably lower than in low- and middle-income countries. The prevalence of HIV in blood donations in high-income countries is 0.003% (median), in comparison with 0.1% and 0.6% in middle- and low-income countries respectively.
With those things in mind, I don't have a problem of disallowing donations from certain countries, in theory. In practice, it depends on exactly which countries are on the "no-fly list", and the safety statistics of those countries.
Also, the American Red Cross has called for an end to the lifetime male homosexual donation ban.
I'd prefer to give to other charities with lower administrative overhead, but none of the information you've provided argues compellingly for a boycott of Humble Bundle...then again, that's your choice to make for yourself.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Every bundle has had the option to change how the money you pay is divided. You can give it all to charity, all to developers, or for whatever silly reason, all to the Humble Tip option if you want. You can also customize which charity, which developer, gets how much of the alloted portion of the total. Personally, what with all the things happening lately, I've been favoring the EFF heavily in my purchases.
Goddammit just when I get my first +5 the Beta rolls out and kills everything
Your link says in no uncertain terms: "Unfortunately, documentary evidence is incomplete and leaves room for uncertainty"
A slightly longer quote: "Unfortunately, documentary evidence is incomplete and leaves room for uncertainty. Some conclusions can nevertheless be drawn from the works of historians[...] And later: "there is no doubt that senior ICRC officials had become aware of the genocide by the summer of 1942." and then "it is known of course that the German Red Cross was itself under Nazi control and that its main leaders took part in the persecution and genocide." And the closer: "These actions are not negligible, since every life saved is priceless, but they cannot obscure the fact that, overall, the ICRC's efforts were a failure."
But thanks for quoting the ONLY HALF OF A SENTENCE to support your cracked out position.
That's not really persecution there... Being able to skip-out on blood drives and ditch military conscription seem like POSITIVES to me.
Perhaps not everyone shares your devotion to avoiding civil service and shirking responsibility?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Cite the 0.0000000016%, otherwise I believe you're pulling a number out of your ass.
You mean like the link I provided to you in my original post that you totally ignored? Let me put it up there for you again: The link you missed.
And let me now quote for you directly from that link, since apparently your left mouse button broke:
The FDA consulted its panel of scientific advisers in September of 2000 about revising the policy regarding MSM disqualification to allow MSM to donate if they have been abstinent for five years, and the panel voted 7-6 against revising the standards. Using a series of statistical assumptions, a panel doctor estimated that potentially 1 or 2 infected units of blood per year could reach the blood supply if the policy were relaxed. The U.S. collects approximately 12 million units of blood per year.
1.5 divided by 12 million equals... wait for it... 0.0(...)016%
Hey, did you know that, in the past and currently, there were complete asshats that did asshat-like things who were part of the gay community, the church, open-source movement, BSA, childsplay, England, AnimalAid, academia, and/or $YOURFAVORITEORGANIZATION?
Yes, I do. But few organizations have made it an institutional priority to discriminate against them, and for those few that have, I take special care in not supporting them. And for the record, I don't worry about whether or not there's discrimination in the charity money I give away... because I go out on the street, find someone who needs help, and then help them. Myself.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The Red Cross knew about the concentration camps in Germany during WWII, but did nothing to help them.
What exactly do you expect them to have done? Send one of their armored divisions to overthrow Hitler?
No, I expect them to have gone to the allied powers, who did have armored divisions and tell them what was going on. The allies arrived in Germany weeks after the landing to find bodies rotting in open air, where the Germans had simply locked all the gates and abandoned them to fate. They could have saved those lives -- and they didn't. They made a choice not to. At no point during the war, until the pictures were on the front pages of all the newspapers and the true horror of what had been going on inside Germany's borders had been revealed, did they pop their head in at Geneva and say "oh yeah, we totally knew about that."
they also won't accept [harbus.org] blood donations from gay men.
Because federal law won't let them.
And I see they're fighting real hard to end that discrimination right now too. Oh wait, they aren't. In fact, they petitioned the FDA to continue it; As it is FDA guideline not federal law that is the administrative body behind the rule.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Do you know what a "sentence" is? I ask because I definitely quoted it in it's entirety, with the sole exception of omitting the period...
Let's try another quote:
In 1942: " Burckhardt added that since there was no place where they could be resettled, this could only mean one thing."
Except that really wasn't true, until Madagascar was recaptured by the British in November 1942:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
That doesn't change the fact that being excluded from responsibilities is hardly persecution.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Out of curiosity, do you think that Red Cross employees are aliens from another planet, or do you think that Red Cross employees in Germany might've been Germans and that they might've sympathized with the Nazis? It just seems like a strange argument to make - that German Red Cross employees should be impervious to being swept up in the ideas of "normal" Germans, and that the International Red Cross is responsible for the behavior of their German employees during the Second World War.
I'm actually thinking that IBM (a non-German company who helped Germany) and BMW (a German company who built weapons for the Nazis) are actually more culpable for harm done during WW2 than the Red Cross is. (I assume you're still boycotting them.)
Personally, I was pretty annoyed that the Red Cross was offering first aid to Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Though, in their defense, they have a policy of taking no sides in a conflict, and I would suppose that it might help protect them from being killed by those reprehensible Jihadis.
1. The allies were perfectly aware of what was going on in the concentration camps. They just did not consider dealing it to be a priority. So your proposed course of action would have absolutely zero effect on what happened.
2. The Red Cross (along with the AMA and AABB) has been against the ban on MSM blood donation since 2006.
Out of curiosity, do you think that Red Cross employees are aliens from another planet, or do you think that Red Cross employees in Germany might've been Germans and that they might've sympathized with the Nazis?
If you read the link, you'd know that headquarters knew; They were in Switzerland. They remained silent. It wasn't just those "evil germans".
I'm actually thinking that IBM (a non-German company who helped Germany) and BMW (a German company who built weapons for the Nazis) are actually more culpable for harm done during WW2 than the Red Cross is. (I assume you're still boycotting them.)
Yes, actually.
ersonally, I was pretty annoyed that the Red Cross was offering first aid to Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan/Pakistan.
Well, the same could be said about Doctors Without Borders; A life is a life. Unless, apparently, you were Jewish or gay. And that's what I have a problem with; Selective application of ideals. Yeah, they say they've learned their lesson... but have they? The Red Cross has been getting caught in too many controversies even recently... google their hatchet job on the 9/11 donations.
It's just irritating that Slashdot collectively missed the point when they modbombed me, which is this: Let me choose which charities get my money... don't shove it down my throat. It's just poor marketing; A good idea but a bad implimentation. It would be trivial to select which charity at checkout and eliminate the problem... but nobody thought of it.
And apparently, if Slashdot is any indication, there's actually resistance to the idea that someone could object to certain charities. I mean, they're all good, right? :/
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That doesn't change the fact that being excluded from responsibilities is hardly persecution.
And if you're broke, and everyone else can donate plasma or blood for cash and you can't... That's not discriminatory either.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That's how Humble Bundles work. The Humble Store is different. It has fixed prices and the customer has no control over how their money is used. It is possible developers have a say but this has not yet been made clear.
+0 Meh
Except it's sorta completely illegal to pay someone for blood, tissue, or organ donations.
To be fair, there are some loop-holes, allowing "gifts" to donors, like so:
http://www.idle.slashdot.org/story/10/01/12/1713201/Bloodmobile-Offers-Beer-To-Blood-Donors
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I should also mention that, yes, Plasma is one of those loop-hole cases, where most donors get a tiny amount of cash for their time. But any number of other factors can disqualify anyone from doing that.
And there's a good FDA write-up quite intelligently explaining the policy:
http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/BloodBloodProducts/QuestionsaboutBlood/ucm108186.htm
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"they also won't accept blood donations from gay men"
So? Here in Quebec, anyone who spent more than three months in the UK or France between January 1, 1980 and December 31, 1996 cannot give blood. Basically, because I spent 6 months in France in 1996, I'm now considered subhuman. And you know what? I don't make a fuss about it.
What is the reasoning behind that?
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
In case this doesn't work out, let's hope someone uses something to this effect:
Humble Bundles stumbles; CEO bumbles, mumble stockholders.
The Red Cross is strictly apolitical. Only this allows them to go and help everywhere. As soon as they would take sides in a conflict, they're out of (their) business. The more lunatic a leader is (think e.g. Assad/Syria these days), the more likely he would deny the RC to enter his country and help. And most of the time (the people in) these countries need help the most.
Lizzie Cuevas, Director of Communications at Humble Bundle Inc. says:
"The charity split is and always will be a fixed 10% of Humble Store purchases. The charity list will change with time and giving both developers and customers the option to choose charities is something we will consider in the future."
http://indiestatik.com/2013/11/12/humble-store/
+0 Meh