Right? Why should police and people whose job it is to locate and remove dangerous or threatening content actually have to work? It's totally a better situation for them to just make a law that says everyone has to police themselves, and then just collect their paycheck anyway.
Saying people should be responsible for things other people post on their third-party internet services is like saying you should arrest a building owner for vandalism when someone tags his store sign.
GameStop says 17 percent of its sales are paid in trade credits. The implication is clear — if the games industry lost 17 percent of its sales tomorrow, that would be a bad day for the publishers and developers.
Is GameStop now the only place that sells games in the world? Losing 17% of GameStop sales is not equal to losing 17% of overall sales. Also, GameStop has this nasty habit(which I have seen countless times myself) of taking pristine used games and selling them as new. They often only cut ~$1 to $5 off a recent used game's price, which is ridiculous for a $60 game. If someone already had that game, and used the crap out of it, it is no longer worth $58. They already paid the premium to the distributor and the developer, so that becomes pure profit that goes right into their corporate pockets.
There's also the issues of $60 for a disc-only game without manual or proper case, and totally chewed discs that they won't accept returns on, but will instead try to make you pay the difference for a new copy. They are slimy as hell, regardless of why people don't like them.
It's actually quite simple to raise a small number of food animals yourself. It's much harder not to become attached to them as pets. I know quite a few people who have a couple chickens in their back yard, or a pig as a 'pet'.
This is why I hate it when "security questions" are obvious things that anyone who knows me even slightly can figure out easily.
"What was the name of your first pet?" Hell you can find that with Google.
If it's so easy, kindly tell me my first pet's name, my date of birth, the city I was born in, the make of the first car I drove, my first school's name, my mother's maiden name, and the answer (or even question) to my 'other' security question? Keep in mind these need to be formatted exactly as I have entered them, and not as you may have copied them from a public record.
Security questions are plenty secure, as long as you don't have a path to just avoid them entirely, as Apple so kindly provided here.
Not using services where you can call at all would be a good start. Like, I don't know, hosting your own servers for your multimillion dollar tech site instead of using Apple nonsense?
Seems about right. For someone who purports to be in touch with tech and security trends, that guy is kind of fail. If you know what you're doing, iCloud, and anything involving iLife or.mac is NOT the right answer.
Because the splash screen and Steam client don't provide enough opportunity to throw logos and advertising in your face. They need to be able to do it everywhere from the desktop to the Application Launcher menu icon.
Also, it would let them make sure the games they distribute for 'linux' are compatible with a specific distro. Just picking Ubuntu or the base Debian distro is too mainstream.
I like to pirate stuff as much as the next guy, but that's simply not true. Yes, many people pirate software on the PC, but the fact remains that a HUGE part of the gaming market is not on a PC at all, and pirating games for console systems has become exceedingly complicated.
Even on the PC, sales still outweigh pirated copies by quite a bit. The media and industry really want you to believe that piracy is this HUGE issue driving them out of business, but it isn't at all. My personal experience is when working for Sony, our sales team estimated the total loss to piracy to be right around 1.2% of our total sales. Some months would be as high as 2.5% or so, but usually much less.
My only idea for why software developers might be struggling is a lack of original material. Is Killzone 8 or CoD:12 really going to sell as much as Killzone or CoD: 2/3? Of course not, people get bored with that identical rehashing of control, plot, graphics, etc. Also, the technology used for games has nearly stagnated. Yes, you have all the new DirectX 10/11 geometry shaders and cool features like that, but due to the cost of hardware to properly run them most people remain at a DX9.0c level of gaming. With new computers shipping with DX10/11 compatible hardware now, they can use the newer games but just because that feature is supported doesn't mean it will run at full, or even one step above the lowest settings. Even simple games like Minecraft (which prides itself in being low-res) require more in the way of graphics and hardware than a stock one-year-old i3 laptop can provide.
Gaming on OSX is still struggling a bit, but with the introduction of Intel processors and the whole Parallels feature, it's much easier. Still, not much is being made specifically for Mac rather than being ported over as an afterthought. Perhaps, just perhaps, someone at Apple could take a hint and not require programs to be written primarily in Objective-C (speaking of Kludge...).
I think the major problem is people looking at 'games for linux' like it was 'games for Windows'. Linux doesn't refer to one operating system, it refers to hundreds and hundreds of variations of an operating system, running all sorts of different desktop environments on all different types of hardware with patchy driver support.
If there were an operating system Linux that they were making games for, it might work, but does that mean Debian, or Ubuntu(based on Debian) or Fedora, or SuSE, or what? There's just too many platforms within the category to properly support them all from one port of a game.
My ASUS from four years ago has 1920 x 1200, which is plenty of resolution for me. My HP from three years ago has 1650 x 1050 which is also a fine resolution. My ASUS from two years ago has 1920 x 1200 as well...
What exactly was so hard to find for you? Have you heard of NewEgg? It's rather simple to find a device by screen resolution. Just don't go to Best Buy and ask for their cheapest computer(which, at $379, still had bigger than 768 vertical res, Samsung something-or-other).
I hope Microsoft grows a pair and properly sues Apple for what is clearly a deliberate copy, name included, of their new device.
Apple is always quick to litigate over even the most obscure toe-stepping by companies on its products, so it only seems natural that when they blatantly rip off another device they should pay the same price, even if they don't lose the suit.
Agreed, seems like a total logic failure. I am quite certain at this point the amount of energy required to entangle particles is quite steep, as well as corralling them into whatever 'box' you're using.
Keeping them in that 'box', and keeping them from losing their entanglement will also cost them energy, and then I would bet the 'information' gleaned about the paired particle is not 100% accurate, as some particles would inevitably fail to pair or lose their pairing.
Also, when talking on the submicroscopic scale of atoms and subatomic particles, don't you have to take into account that any measurement requires interaction with the particle, which will in some way alter its path? I don't recall the specific physics principle, but it is something along the lines of 'particles below a certain size cannot be measured without affecting their behavior'.
I don't think it depends at all. I think that there is no such thing as too much detail. That said, don't equate detail to 'more stuff'. Just because you have extremely realistic vegetation doesn't mean you should place a hundred branches of a bush in front of the path the player is supposed to take.
You can make everything extremely detailed without any issues, however, it is up to the level editor and layout artists to make sure that extremely detailed art doesn't interfere with gameplay. Maybe your tree needs shorter vines or branches so you can see the path through the woods, or the extremely detailed grass should be trampled in a certain area to delineate the way you should go, or that waterfall needs a little less glare so you can see the hidden entrance behind it. Those aren't matters of detail, but matters of design.
If you RTFA you would know that the participants have no idea they are in a motion simulator, and only know that they are testing a car in a dome-shaped room with a car in it. They don't get to see the crazy robot legs, as they enter from a closed-off jetway.
I hate talking/texting and driving as much as the next guy, but I want my internet radio on my phone while I drive. I don't need to touch/look at it for that, and a cell jammer would stop that from being possible. Maybe if they can block the calls without blocking the 3G...hell, I'd have it on all the time with me, so I can use data but no annoying calls.
Read comments on parent post. There is a SCOTUS ruling saying forced arbitration is allowed, however, if the company loses they are required to pay more than they would with a class-action suit.
AT&T has lost many, many class-action lawsuits, some in more recent history relating to 3G and their advertising of the same product as both 3G/4G. It never even hurts them, it just costs them a small chunk of cash which, of course, goes directly to the lawyers and nobody else. Valve doesn't have that kind of capital, so they would probably be ruined by any class action suit, no matter how frivolous and ridiculous the claims. What does Valve make that could really hurt anyone? Even if they make SeizureQuest, and it causes severe epileptic reactions, they disclaim that in their EULA and general terms of sale. You can't file a lawsuit over that anyway.
Why go through the trouble of a whole lawsuit to benefit a lawyer? The lawyer is using you in those suits, and it doesn't benefit anyone but them.
Valve is not some huge conglomerate with billions to spend, and an average max product price of $50-60(which mostly goes to the developers and their studios). Why would you want to take their money and put it in the pockets of some weasley fucker who just wants to use your problem to pay off his house? Isn't that just going to stifle advancement by Valve and Steam? Don't we have enough bullshit in the courts today?
Class action suits are a nuisance to our legal system. This is probably a step in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Right? Why should police and people whose job it is to locate and remove dangerous or threatening content actually have to work? It's totally a better situation for them to just make a law that says everyone has to police themselves, and then just collect their paycheck anyway.
Saying people should be responsible for things other people post on their third-party internet services is like saying you should arrest a building owner for vandalism when someone tags his store sign.
GameStop says 17 percent of its sales are paid in trade credits. The implication is clear — if the games industry lost 17 percent of its sales tomorrow, that would be a bad day for the publishers and developers.
Is GameStop now the only place that sells games in the world? Losing 17% of GameStop sales is not equal to losing 17% of overall sales. Also, GameStop has this nasty habit(which I have seen countless times myself) of taking pristine used games and selling them as new. They often only cut ~$1 to $5 off a recent used game's price, which is ridiculous for a $60 game. If someone already had that game, and used the crap out of it, it is no longer worth $58. They already paid the premium to the distributor and the developer, so that becomes pure profit that goes right into their corporate pockets.
There's also the issues of $60 for a disc-only game without manual or proper case, and totally chewed discs that they won't accept returns on, but will instead try to make you pay the difference for a new copy. They are slimy as hell, regardless of why people don't like them.
Only USA Today would quote a floral designer on the history of crustaceans.
Homo industrius
Hm, is that like the construction worker in the Village People?
It's actually quite simple to raise a small number of food animals yourself. It's much harder not to become attached to them as pets. I know quite a few people who have a couple chickens in their back yard, or a pig as a 'pet'.
This is why I hate it when "security questions" are obvious things that anyone who knows me even slightly can figure out easily.
"What was the name of your first pet?" Hell you can find that with Google.
If it's so easy, kindly tell me my first pet's name, my date of birth, the city I was born in, the make of the first car I drove, my first school's name, my mother's maiden name, and the answer (or even question) to my 'other' security question? Keep in mind these need to be formatted exactly as I have entered them, and not as you may have copied them from a public record.
Security questions are plenty secure, as long as you don't have a path to just avoid them entirely, as Apple so kindly provided here.
Not using services where you can call at all would be a good start. Like, I don't know, hosting your own servers for your multimillion dollar tech site instead of using Apple nonsense?
Seems about right. For someone who purports to be in touch with tech and security trends, that guy is kind of fail. If you know what you're doing, iCloud, and anything involving iLife or .mac is NOT the right answer.
why on earth would they want to do that?
Because the splash screen and Steam client don't provide enough opportunity to throw logos and advertising in your face. They need to be able to do it everywhere from the desktop to the Application Launcher menu icon.
Also, it would let them make sure the games they distribute for 'linux' are compatible with a specific distro. Just picking Ubuntu or the base Debian distro is too mainstream.
As a whole games are mostly pirated
I like to pirate stuff as much as the next guy, but that's simply not true. Yes, many people pirate software on the PC, but the fact remains that a HUGE part of the gaming market is not on a PC at all, and pirating games for console systems has become exceedingly complicated.
Even on the PC, sales still outweigh pirated copies by quite a bit. The media and industry really want you to believe that piracy is this HUGE issue driving them out of business, but it isn't at all. My personal experience is when working for Sony, our sales team estimated the total loss to piracy to be right around 1.2% of our total sales. Some months would be as high as 2.5% or so, but usually much less.
My only idea for why software developers might be struggling is a lack of original material. Is Killzone 8 or CoD:12 really going to sell as much as Killzone or CoD: 2/3? Of course not, people get bored with that identical rehashing of control, plot, graphics, etc. Also, the technology used for games has nearly stagnated. Yes, you have all the new DirectX 10/11 geometry shaders and cool features like that, but due to the cost of hardware to properly run them most people remain at a DX9.0c level of gaming. With new computers shipping with DX10/11 compatible hardware now, they can use the newer games but just because that feature is supported doesn't mean it will run at full, or even one step above the lowest settings. Even simple games like Minecraft (which prides itself in being low-res) require more in the way of graphics and hardware than a stock one-year-old i3 laptop can provide.
Gaming on OSX is still struggling a bit, but with the introduction of Intel processors and the whole Parallels feature, it's much easier. Still, not much is being made specifically for Mac rather than being ported over as an afterthought. Perhaps, just perhaps, someone at Apple could take a hint and not require programs to be written primarily in Objective-C (speaking of Kludge...).
grr, it stripped the TM trademark logo from Linux(TM).
I think the major problem is people looking at 'games for linux' like it was 'games for Windows'. Linux doesn't refer to one operating system, it refers to hundreds and hundreds of variations of an operating system, running all sorts of different desktop environments on all different types of hardware with patchy driver support.
If there were an operating system Linux that they were making games for, it might work, but does that mean Debian, or Ubuntu(based on Debian) or Fedora, or SuSE, or what? There's just too many platforms within the category to properly support them all from one port of a game.
My ASUS from four years ago has 1920 x 1200, which is plenty of resolution for me. My HP from three years ago has 1650 x 1050 which is also a fine resolution. My ASUS from two years ago has 1920 x 1200 as well...
What exactly was so hard to find for you? Have you heard of NewEgg? It's rather simple to find a device by screen resolution. Just don't go to Best Buy and ask for their cheapest computer(which, at $379, still had bigger than 768 vertical res, Samsung something-or-other).
I hope Microsoft grows a pair and properly sues Apple for what is clearly a deliberate copy, name included, of their new device.
Apple is always quick to litigate over even the most obscure toe-stepping by companies on its products, so it only seems natural that when they blatantly rip off another device they should pay the same price, even if they don't lose the suit.
wouldn't get printed because it's not news.
It's plenty newsworthy, it's just not sensational enough for our retarded "If it bleeds, it leads" type 'news' here in America.
Agreed, seems like a total logic failure. I am quite certain at this point the amount of energy required to entangle particles is quite steep, as well as corralling them into whatever 'box' you're using.
Keeping them in that 'box', and keeping them from losing their entanglement will also cost them energy, and then I would bet the 'information' gleaned about the paired particle is not 100% accurate, as some particles would inevitably fail to pair or lose their pairing.
Also, when talking on the submicroscopic scale of atoms and subatomic particles, don't you have to take into account that any measurement requires interaction with the particle, which will in some way alter its path? I don't recall the specific physics principle, but it is something along the lines of 'particles below a certain size cannot be measured without affecting their behavior'.
I don't think it depends at all. I think that there is no such thing as too much detail. That said, don't equate detail to 'more stuff'. Just because you have extremely realistic vegetation doesn't mean you should place a hundred branches of a bush in front of the path the player is supposed to take.
You can make everything extremely detailed without any issues, however, it is up to the level editor and layout artists to make sure that extremely detailed art doesn't interfere with gameplay. Maybe your tree needs shorter vines or branches so you can see the path through the woods, or the extremely detailed grass should be trampled in a certain area to delineate the way you should go, or that waterfall needs a little less glare so you can see the hidden entrance behind it. Those aren't matters of detail, but matters of design.
If you RTFA you would know that the participants have no idea they are in a motion simulator, and only know that they are testing a car in a dome-shaped room with a car in it. They don't get to see the crazy robot legs, as they enter from a closed-off jetway.
I hate talking/texting and driving as much as the next guy, but I want my internet radio on my phone while I drive. I don't need to touch/look at it for that, and a cell jammer would stop that from being possible. Maybe if they can block the calls without blocking the 3G...hell, I'd have it on all the time with me, so I can use data but no annoying calls.
I think we can afford one of those simulators in each state if we cut 10% of the military budget. Hell, we should do that just on principle.
Read comments on parent post. There is a SCOTUS ruling saying forced arbitration is allowed, however, if the company loses they are required to pay more than they would with a class-action suit.
AT&T has lost many, many class-action lawsuits, some in more recent history relating to 3G and their advertising of the same product as both 3G/4G. It never even hurts them, it just costs them a small chunk of cash which, of course, goes directly to the lawyers and nobody else. Valve doesn't have that kind of capital, so they would probably be ruined by any class action suit, no matter how frivolous and ridiculous the claims. What does Valve make that could really hurt anyone? Even if they make SeizureQuest, and it causes severe epileptic reactions, they disclaim that in their EULA and general terms of sale. You can't file a lawsuit over that anyway.
If it's egregious, you don't take them to small claims court, you take them to full blown "you can't handle the truth" court.
Why go through the trouble of a whole lawsuit to benefit a lawyer? The lawyer is using you in those suits, and it doesn't benefit anyone but them.
Valve is not some huge conglomerate with billions to spend, and an average max product price of $50-60(which mostly goes to the developers and their studios). Why would you want to take their money and put it in the pockets of some weasley fucker who just wants to use your problem to pay off his house? Isn't that just going to stifle advancement by Valve and Steam? Don't we have enough bullshit in the courts today?
Class action suits are a nuisance to our legal system. This is probably a step in the right direction.