I prefer to think that I responded like a pragmatist.
If he were my dad, I'd obviously want him to get the best healthcare available. But I still wouldn't expect a business to volunteer as part of its business model to foot what is likely to be a sizable medical bill in return for modest up-front compensation. I can see them doing it with surplus funds as a charitable act, or as a public relations stunt, but founding a company on the basis of giving away money just doesn't make sense.
No, he wants to be a griefing fucktard and then get camped by angry vigilantes. Griefing with impunity, especially by abusing game mechanics, is the domain of *non*-pvp oriented MMOs.
From there they drop you for filing a fraudulent application and no other insurer will pay for your pre-existing condition (except Medicaid).
This is something I've never understood. Why should an insurance company pay for treatment for a pre-existing medical condition? That's like me crashing my car, then going and buying insurance so I can claim for 'pre-existing vehicle damage'.
Pardon my mercenary attitude, but why exactly would they want to insure you? You're getting towards the end of your life, and within a few years you will likely require medical treatment far exceeding what you would pay for health insurance. That's why you want to buy it. And that's why they don't want to sell you it - because it's very likely to be an excellent deal for you and a very poor one for them.
Actually what he did is more along the lines of writing a cheque to Amazon for a CD they sell. Then sneaking into their offices at night, bullshitting the police into thinking you work for Amazon even though you don't, burning yourself a copy of the CD you bought, bullshitting the property owner into issuing an (illegal) order to all Amazon staff barring them from the city block around their building, and then flying home with your burned CD.
Australia is part of Asia. A decent proportion of our population are of Asian origin. If you're talking about foreign computer science students who want to stay on in Perth to make games, the percentage goes up even higher.:) That said, though IZ was a very diverse group of people from all over the world.
Remember that it's not so bad to leave a country to do business elsewhere. When I worked in Naples, I would not get almost any pay. Yes, I was a kid and I was supposed to work for my father, but I wanted something off from it. If it doesn't work like you want to, you go somewhere where it does.
It IS so bad when you use a bunch of legal dodgery to take ownership of the IP while evading the millions of dollars of debt that you owe to the staff. It IS bad when you break a whole bunch of laws to get that IP out of the country, so you can start another studio in another country without actually paying what you owe to any of your employees. And (personal conjecture here) it IS bad when you will most likely you will do exactly the same to the new studio.
What I don't get is that they're crapping on about "Windows 7" using a lot of memory but they make no mention at any point of what applications are running. They're not talking about Windows 7 machines sitting there at the login prompt or on a default installation with no apps running, are they?
You have control over it. You are funding the behavior by paying taxes. You have a choice. You can influence others to vote more intelligently. You can run for office yourself. In the extreme, you can move to another political district where your tax dollars won't be used to finance child porn. I know, democracy and responsibility can sometimes be inconvenient.
Wait what? If he has no right to vote then I doubt he'd be able to run for office (or can you? I don't know American plolotics). Are you suggesting that he can withhold taxes if he doesn't agree with current policy? (why didn't anyone tell me you can do that?!) Otherwise your comment that he can move to another political district to escape his current government is pretty weak; the same argument applies to places like Iran and North Korea too (although admittedly Pennsylvania is less likely to shoot you or your remaining family if you do so).
If your customers somehow took 85% of your revenue, you'd do something - anything - to stop the hemorage.
If you want to stay in business, there's one thing you'd better NOT do - and that's piss off the people who DO pay for your product or service. I know that I, for one, will certainly not be buying any game that phones home like this.
Oh, and don't confuse "playing a copy of the game" with "taking the company's revenue" - the company doesn't gain or lose a cent unless the person playing the pirated copy would otherwise have paid for a legit copy. If I decide that Nissans have terrible handling and so I buy a Toyota instead, I'm not "taking Nissan's revenue." If I decide that Nissans are too expensive and I buy a dodgy Chinese copy of a popular model Nissan instead of the Toyota, I'm STILL not "taking Nissan's revenue."
No - the point is that it seems to be the same group of people who are all deadset convinced that human activity is doing SOMETHING to the climate and that the world is going to end because of it. They will grab onto any scrap of evidence that the climate is changing in any way - which it does, constantly - and claim that it must be anthropogenic and that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. Five years ago it was Global Warming, now it's Climate Change.
Yes, but this isn't the real world, it's a movie on my TV. It's my entertainment and it should fit itself around what I want - the quiet bits should be clearly audible even if a car's going past my house, and the loud bits should be quiet enough that my neighbours don't call the cops again.
Dynamic range compression is exactly what I want, but I want it to be something I can turn on and off. If I'm watching a movie with my wife on a quiet night, I'll want it off so we can get the full cinematic experience. If I have mates over for the afternoon and we're watching Iron Man again then I'll want it on. It would be simple enough to make it a built-in function on any digital home theatre sound system.
Yes, but "a campaign" isn't a fixed amount of game, and it doesn't take a fixed amount of work to produce. You're complaining about them charging three times the price for three times the work. Instead they could have cut each campaign down to fit the amount of work needed into their time budget, but they chose not to do so because they didn't want to compromise their storylines. They have every right to do that, just as (as you said before) you have every right to get annoyed about it and not buy the game.
Sure, they're comparable. Despite the semantics of who chose what path of publication, to the audience they were things that started as a single offering and were broken up into trilogies for practical purposes.
The reason they broke it up isn't that they were trying to "give you less" in some way, it was that the three stories they wanted to tell were too big to fit into one box.
See, instead of selling me "Starcraft II", they're selling me "Starcraft II, Terran Campaign" and pretending it's a full sequel to the original. The reality is, to get the full sequel to the original, I'm going to have to buy three games.
You probably liked The Hobbit and then said the same thing about Lord of the Rings.
Exactly. Every Blizzard game they've released has been the source of an "endless stream of money" that makes them "immune to the hard gamedev reality" because the real "hard reality" is that they take the time to polish their games until they shine, and so their games are still selling in shops TEN YEARS LATER. WoW's been out for 5 years, the original Starcraft came out in '98 and is still one of the better RTS games.
Was it that hard to release a Starcraft version based on the Warcraft III engine a couple of years afterwards? Why did they have to make a new engine? The mind boggles.
No, it wasn't that *hard*, but it wasn't *good enough*. WC3 sorta worked because they made it about small parties of units with a hero. Starcraft is a game about massive epic battles with zillions of zerglings, and would have choked the WC3 engine to death.
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I prefer to think that I responded like a pragmatist.
If he were my dad, I'd obviously want him to get the best healthcare available. But I still wouldn't expect a business to volunteer as part of its business model to foot what is likely to be a sizable medical bill in return for modest up-front compensation. I can see them doing it with surplus funds as a charitable act, or as a public relations stunt, but founding a company on the basis of giving away money just doesn't make sense.
No, he wants to be a griefing fucktard and then get camped by angry vigilantes. Griefing with impunity, especially by abusing game mechanics, is the domain of *non*-pvp oriented MMOs.
I have very little respect for the pikeman, who kills his enemies from the safety of the other end of his halberd.
I respect more the lowly grunt, who actually fights with his life during combat, with his dagger and fists.
Cowards should not be held up as heroes.
They are not cowards because they hide in caves, but because they actively seek to cause civilian deaths.
Damn, and I just used my last mod point too. You, sir, have hit the nail on the head.
What's all this about futa? :S
From there they drop you for filing a fraudulent application and no other insurer will pay for your pre-existing condition (except Medicaid).
This is something I've never understood. Why should an insurance company pay for treatment for a pre-existing medical condition? That's like me crashing my car, then going and buying insurance so I can claim for 'pre-existing vehicle damage'.
Pardon my mercenary attitude, but why exactly would they want to insure you? You're getting towards the end of your life, and within a few years you will likely require medical treatment far exceeding what you would pay for health insurance. That's why you want to buy it. And that's why they don't want to sell you it - because it's very likely to be an excellent deal for you and a very poor one for them.
Yes.
Actually what he did is more along the lines of writing a cheque to Amazon for a CD they sell. Then sneaking into their offices at night, bullshitting the police into thinking you work for Amazon even though you don't, burning yourself a copy of the CD you bought, bullshitting the property owner into issuing an (illegal) order to all Amazon staff barring them from the city block around their building, and then flying home with your burned CD.
And then the cheque bounces.
Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot the map demarcations on Wikipedia define whether or not we're part of Asia or not.
Australia is part of Asia. A decent proportion of our population are of Asian origin. If you're talking about foreign computer science students who want to stay on in Perth to make games, the percentage goes up even higher. :) That said, though IZ was a very diverse group of people from all over the world.
Remember that it's not so bad to leave a country to do business elsewhere. When I worked in Naples, I would not get almost any pay. Yes, I was a kid and I was supposed to work for my father, but I wanted something off from it. If it doesn't work like you want to, you go somewhere where it does.
It IS so bad when you use a bunch of legal dodgery to take ownership of the IP while evading the millions of dollars of debt that you owe to the staff. It IS bad when you break a whole bunch of laws to get that IP out of the country, so you can start another studio in another country without actually paying what you owe to any of your employees. And (personal conjecture here) it IS bad when you will most likely you will do exactly the same to the new studio.
Disclaimer: IAAFIZE. I am a former IZ employee.
Yummy. Thankyou, will do this when we get a media box set up. :)
Well, MFC uses 'onidle' handlers which are called continuously while there are no messages in queue. It usually uses these to update UI elements etc.
What I don't get is that they're crapping on about "Windows 7" using a lot of memory but they make no mention at any point of what applications are running. They're not talking about Windows 7 machines sitting there at the login prompt or on a default installation with no apps running, are they?
You have control over it. You are funding the behavior by paying taxes. You have a choice. You can influence others to vote more intelligently. You can run for office yourself. In the extreme, you can move to another political district where your tax dollars won't be used to finance child porn. I know, democracy and responsibility can sometimes be inconvenient.
Wait what? If he has no right to vote then I doubt he'd be able to run for office (or can you? I don't know American plolotics). Are you suggesting that he can withhold taxes if he doesn't agree with current policy? (why didn't anyone tell me you can do that?!) Otherwise your comment that he can move to another political district to escape his current government is pretty weak; the same argument applies to places like Iran and North Korea too (although admittedly Pennsylvania is less likely to shoot you or your remaining family if you do so).
Dunno about the States but in Australia you can easily spend that much. These days it's $8 - $10 a bottle for longnecks in some clubs.
If your customers somehow took 85% of your revenue, you'd do something - anything - to stop the hemorage.
If you want to stay in business, there's one thing you'd better NOT do - and that's piss off the people who DO pay for your product or service. I know that I, for one, will certainly not be buying any game that phones home like this.
Oh, and don't confuse "playing a copy of the game" with "taking the company's revenue" - the company doesn't gain or lose a cent unless the person playing the pirated copy would otherwise have paid for a legit copy. If I decide that Nissans have terrible handling and so I buy a Toyota instead, I'm not "taking Nissan's revenue." If I decide that Nissans are too expensive and I buy a dodgy Chinese copy of a popular model Nissan instead of the Toyota, I'm STILL not "taking Nissan's revenue."
No - the point is that it seems to be the same group of people who are all deadset convinced that human activity is doing SOMETHING to the climate and that the world is going to end because of it. They will grab onto any scrap of evidence that the climate is changing in any way - which it does, constantly - and claim that it must be anthropogenic and that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. Five years ago it was Global Warming, now it's Climate Change.
Yes, but this isn't the real world, it's a movie on my TV. It's my entertainment and it should fit itself around what I want - the quiet bits should be clearly audible even if a car's going past my house, and the loud bits should be quiet enough that my neighbours don't call the cops again.
Dynamic range compression is exactly what I want, but I want it to be something I can turn on and off. If I'm watching a movie with my wife on a quiet night, I'll want it off so we can get the full cinematic experience. If I have mates over for the afternoon and we're watching Iron Man again then I'll want it on. It would be simple enough to make it a built-in function on any digital home theatre sound system.
Yes, but "a campaign" isn't a fixed amount of game, and it doesn't take a fixed amount of work to produce. You're complaining about them charging three times the price for three times the work. Instead they could have cut each campaign down to fit the amount of work needed into their time budget, but they chose not to do so because they didn't want to compromise their storylines. They have every right to do that, just as (as you said before) you have every right to get annoyed about it and not buy the game.
Sure, they're comparable. Despite the semantics of who chose what path of publication, to the audience they were things that started as a single offering and were broken up into trilogies for practical purposes.
The reason they broke it up isn't that they were trying to "give you less" in some way, it was that the three stories they wanted to tell were too big to fit into one box.
See, instead of selling me "Starcraft II", they're selling me "Starcraft II, Terran Campaign" and pretending it's a full sequel to the original. The reality is, to get the full sequel to the original, I'm going to have to buy three games.
You probably liked The Hobbit and then said the same thing about Lord of the Rings.
Exactly. Every Blizzard game they've released has been the source of an "endless stream of money" that makes them "immune to the hard gamedev reality" because the real "hard reality" is that they take the time to polish their games until they shine, and so their games are still selling in shops TEN YEARS LATER. WoW's been out for 5 years, the original Starcraft came out in '98 and is still one of the better RTS games.
Was it that hard to release a Starcraft version based on the Warcraft III engine a couple of years afterwards? Why did they have to make a new engine? The mind boggles.
No, it wasn't that *hard*, but it wasn't *good enough*. WC3 sorta worked because they made it about small parties of units with a hero. Starcraft is a game about massive epic battles with zillions of zerglings, and would have choked the WC3 engine to death.