I don't mind spending a lot of time on a game as long as it's not something that requires timed intervention or requires such depth that if you step away from the game for a week it's like you're re-learning everything.
A good example of the timed intervention problem is Pokemon Diamond/Pearl. It had a Farmville problem, if you didn't water your plants once a week there would be a mass extinction, and there were some other things that required timed intervention like that. That's not a game you can play unless you have tons of free time.
Then a lot of older RPGs had the depth problem, if you went away from the game for a week you'd come back and be like "Wait, WTF was I doing again?" but it's not something you see too much these days, modern RPGs have some kind of "organizer" feature to help keep you on track.
An example of a long game that working adults can play is the Stalker series. The first one at least takes a good while to finish and would suffer from the depth problem if not for the PDA keeping track of tasks, but you can save any time, put it down and come back to it any time and not be lost.
Games offer so much more content than your random games of yesteryear
LOLWUT? Some of them, yes, but on average the amount of content in a game is roughly the same or perhaps decreasing. Unless you're counting all this DRM fluff which rarely adds value.
The technical capability to do this already exists in some cars, I wonder how long it will be...have the ECU drop into safe mode and have nonessential features deactivate if the car is regularly parked far from the usual place. If you move you'll just have to call up the manufacturer for reactivation. Not too different from how Windows tracks hardware changes.
I've already met this situation with PDAs. Voted with my wallet until there was nothing left to vote for.
The Droid 4 has all the right hardware though (it has a GSM module but it won't be activated at launch) so maybe there's some potential to hack that up. It might be illegal by then but who gives a fuck.
That investment is people's salaries, rent on the buildings, power bills, computer and desks.
Oh boo freaking hoo. Most of us would be out on the street from one significant financial slip-up, but we're supposed to pity the boneheaded fuckers in the game industry who can't tell good business from their own assholes?
All they have to do is sell the games cheap and DRM-free to turn pirates into customers. It's not fucking rocket science. People will be able to pirate your games just as easily either way. In the current situation, the incentive to pirate is driven by horrific DRM and a $60+ cost, and the disincentive is a little bit of up-front effort. Sell the game for under $20 without DRM and probably half of the pirates become customers, while you retain all your old customers, and you get new customers who couldn't afford your games before or were offended by the DRM! The downside? Fucking nothing! You can lay off your DRM developers who can crawl back into the dark pit they came out of and shut down your DRM servers. Your initial costs are CUT, your running costs are CUT, and it BRINGS IN MORE REVENUE. Figure it out morons!
As for used games, if you sell your games cheap and DRM-free with online backup and official support, why would anyone buy used? Seriously it's astounding that these are the idiots who get rich.
I was thinking this could open up an opportunity for a Twitter competitor. Something with multiple mirrored servers running in a failover arrangement, running on darknets with a web-to-darknet portal as the main site. Maybe start with the identi.ca source code.
Less free because it may ask you to put your recyclables in a bin and possibly have some kind of carbon trading scheme? OH NOES TEH HORROR!!!
As for the rest of it...well I don't see the point in trying to argue through that much sand and tinfoil. What's funniest is that denialists rail against the influence of "big green" but see no potential problems with the influence of Big Oil.
I think that says it all. What surprises me most is that the top denialist "scientists" dug up an old, easily disproven, barroom-grade argument ("No *atmospheric* warning in the last decade or two! IT'S A HOAX!") as their primary argument. It's like the response doesn't even matter, and they know it.
Yeah I LOL'd hard at that one. "Forget all that old testament stuff, but fuck gays (in a non-sexual way), look at this Old Testament quote that backs me up."
Leviticus, the book of crazy. Christians would do well to just pretend it doesn't exist. I kind of pity the more level-headed Christians who have to deal with this heaping pile of anti-Christian ammunition.
"My country has a very liberal press, just the other day a photo of a woman revealing her lower nose ran on the front page of the most popular newspaper!"
"So let's see, you live in Afghanistan...adjusting for cultural differences...good lord you're practically living in a Star Trek utopia!"
Given the opportunity, my first use of an fMRI lie detector would be to find out once and for all if libertarians actually believe this, or if it's just a lame attempt to appeal to leftists.
I always thought the same thing, I have to wonder if libertarians read 1984 and think "OMG living in this world would be horrible!" and then read Snow Crash and think "OMG living in this world would be awesome!"
2) The use of drones by police departments is a nonissue. These drones aren't carrying weapons -- they're no different from helicopters, except that they're cheaper, which is a good thing.
While this is technically correct, the line of thinking that a cheaper, easier new approach to surveillance is OK because it could have been done by traditional means less stealthily and at much greater cost should not be defended.
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within a year you would start to see all cars becoming sold per 'license basis' with endless number of conditions attached. actually everything else.
See: Nissan GTR, McLaren F1, Maybach, Ferrari FXX, Lotus T125.
The Nissan GTR is a $100k daily-drivable car, it's creeping down from the million dollar toys...
I don't mind spending a lot of time on a game as long as it's not something that requires timed intervention or requires such depth that if you step away from the game for a week it's like you're re-learning everything.
A good example of the timed intervention problem is Pokemon Diamond/Pearl. It had a Farmville problem, if you didn't water your plants once a week there would be a mass extinction, and there were some other things that required timed intervention like that. That's not a game you can play unless you have tons of free time.
Then a lot of older RPGs had the depth problem, if you went away from the game for a week you'd come back and be like "Wait, WTF was I doing again?" but it's not something you see too much these days, modern RPGs have some kind of "organizer" feature to help keep you on track.
An example of a long game that working adults can play is the Stalker series. The first one at least takes a good while to finish and would suffer from the depth problem if not for the PDA keeping track of tasks, but you can save any time, put it down and come back to it any time and not be lost.
I've seen game developers, in one case personally on this board, say that used game sales are exactly equal to for-profit piracy.
Games offer so much more content than your random games of yesteryear
LOLWUT? Some of them, yes, but on average the amount of content in a game is roughly the same or perhaps decreasing. Unless you're counting all this DRM fluff which rarely adds value.
I just go to the hardware store and get my keys copied for a few dollars...
But imagine if Ford's TracKey required a fingerprint scan to work, that would be more like it.
GoG vs. TPB? GoG looks better IMO.
A lot of pirate releases now include all the DLC goodies preinstalled.
The technical capability to do this already exists in some cars, I wonder how long it will be...have the ECU drop into safe mode and have nonessential features deactivate if the car is regularly parked far from the usual place. If you move you'll just have to call up the manufacturer for reactivation. Not too different from how Windows tracks hardware changes.
I've already met this situation with PDAs. Voted with my wallet until there was nothing left to vote for.
The Droid 4 has all the right hardware though (it has a GSM module but it won't be activated at launch) so maybe there's some potential to hack that up. It might be illegal by then but who gives a fuck.
That investment is people's salaries, rent on the buildings, power bills, computer and desks.
Oh boo freaking hoo. Most of us would be out on the street from one significant financial slip-up, but we're supposed to pity the boneheaded fuckers in the game industry who can't tell good business from their own assholes?
All they have to do is sell the games cheap and DRM-free to turn pirates into customers. It's not fucking rocket science. People will be able to pirate your games just as easily either way. In the current situation, the incentive to pirate is driven by horrific DRM and a $60+ cost, and the disincentive is a little bit of up-front effort. Sell the game for under $20 without DRM and probably half of the pirates become customers, while you retain all your old customers, and you get new customers who couldn't afford your games before or were offended by the DRM! The downside? Fucking nothing! You can lay off your DRM developers who can crawl back into the dark pit they came out of and shut down your DRM servers. Your initial costs are CUT, your running costs are CUT, and it BRINGS IN MORE REVENUE. Figure it out morons!
As for used games, if you sell your games cheap and DRM-free with online backup and official support, why would anyone buy used? Seriously it's astounding that these are the idiots who get rich.
Kids opening up PC power supplies sounds like a very harsh form of population control 8-(
I was thinking this could open up an opportunity for a Twitter competitor. Something with multiple mirrored servers running in a failover arrangement, running on darknets with a web-to-darknet portal as the main site. Maybe start with the identi.ca source code.
Less free because it may ask you to put your recyclables in a bin and possibly have some kind of carbon trading scheme? OH NOES TEH HORROR!!!
As for the rest of it...well I don't see the point in trying to argue through that much sand and tinfoil. What's funniest is that denialists rail against the influence of "big green" but see no potential problems with the influence of Big Oil.
I think that says it all. What surprises me most is that the top denialist "scientists" dug up an old, easily disproven, barroom-grade argument ("No *atmospheric* warning in the last decade or two! IT'S A HOAX!") as their primary argument. It's like the response doesn't even matter, and they know it.
I make a point to find out the "secret ingredient" every time they hide it.
I read it. Yes there was also a letter that seems to have shown that he had intent. Still, it's total thought crime.
Oh! Oh, BTW, how do you explain the gilded age with this theory?
I'll admit, there's a correlation. Just like the correlation between pirates and global warming.
Yeah I LOL'd hard at that one. "Forget all that old testament stuff, but fuck gays (in a non-sexual way), look at this Old Testament quote that backs me up."
Leviticus, the book of crazy. Christians would do well to just pretend it doesn't exist. I kind of pity the more level-headed Christians who have to deal with this heaping pile of anti-Christian ammunition.
Oh fuck I used "liberal" inappropriately around Americans. s/liberal press/free press/g.
There is no calibration for cultural differences
"My country has a very liberal press, just the other day a photo of a woman revealing her lower nose ran on the front page of the most popular newspaper!"
"So let's see, you live in Afghanistan...adjusting for cultural differences...good lord you're practically living in a Star Trek utopia!"
Was that before or after their economic crash and the great improvements in transparency that followed?
Given the opportunity, my first use of an fMRI lie detector would be to find out once and for all if libertarians actually believe this, or if it's just a lame attempt to appeal to leftists.
I always thought the same thing, I have to wonder if libertarians read 1984 and think "OMG living in this world would be horrible!" and then read Snow Crash and think "OMG living in this world would be awesome!"
2) The use of drones by police departments is a nonissue. These drones aren't carrying weapons -- they're no different from helicopters, except that they're cheaper, which is a good thing.
While this is technically correct, the line of thinking that a cheaper, easier new approach to surveillance is OK because it could have been done by traditional means less stealthily and at much greater cost should not be defended.