Were that the case, you'd never need to go online to use a backup of a Steam game on another computer. Heads up, online activation = DRM. Steam = online activation. Personally, I find it acceptable because it doesn't limit the _amount_ of activations, and also because it is fairly weakly implemented. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist though.
And you can't just "purge" third party DRM easily. Were that the case noone would have worried about schemes like Ubisoft's always-online DRM.
More importantly, all games on Steam can be run without being connected.
"OMG! A game I'd actually like to buy. That doesn't happen very often. It's cheaper on Steam, but I'll pick it up here anyway to support the little guy." -Not available in your region. "Right, Steam it is then."
Unless that changes (both of the points), Impulse is going to remain largely irrelevant. It seems they realized this themselves, when they started allowing third party DRM to bring some major titles onboard (though, as mentioned, with region restrictions Steam did not have). It seems rather likely Stardock themselves finally decided it wasn't worth the struggle trying to make a dent in Steam, thus selling it off. Time will tell what Gamestop makes of it, if anything.
Fences is ace though. It's the one title I'd be crying for (Objectdock is nice too, but there are free alternatives to that). Good thing you don't need Impulse for it.
From what I read, it wasn't even question of a binary. The mere presence of a _folder_ with the offending name triggered the AV. That AV's gotto be the new benchmark as far as being crappy goes.
I don't quite get your "safety" connection. In Norway, weight is a component of car taxation, and the weight of safety related equipment is taxed just as much as the weight of any other component in the car. If anything, it's a government incentive to _reduce_ the safety of cars. In addition, the 100%+ taxation on new cars significantly slows the renewal of the car pool, which means many ancient cars (both unsafe and inefficient) keep on roaming the roads.
As far as the government reducing taxation, have you ever seen that happen? Certainly not in Norway. _Especially_ with regards to gasoline taxation (the subject gets political attention any time the prices spike, but since the political consensus is that people should drive less anyway the taxes are kept at their regular 70% or so of pump price).
I don't see how any of this offers insulation from issues in the global economy. Since the govt will never reduce the taxation on fuel, it'll hit us just as hard as anywhere else. Also, I somehow think you'll have a hard time showing the gas prices were what caused the collapse of the US economy.
A major contributor in "saving" Norway from the waves of the recent bout of global financial turmoil, was that the government has more than twice as many employees as all companies exposed to competition combined. Not high fuel prices...
I'd just like to point out, since you bring up Norway, that the fuel (and other car related) taxes are not meant to pay for public transportation and road upkeep, it's just another way to get money into the government coffers. Politically, cars are "bad" and should not be used, thus taxes to try to bring usage down. But, of course, since it's a necessity of life, the only result is that people suck up the cost and use it anyway since the taxes are intentionally kept at a level where that's financially possible for most. The actual income from those taxes are used on everything _except_ transit infrastructure. Whenever (somewhat exaggerated, but not by much) money for an actual road is needed, they build a toll booth to finance it.
If the government actually used all the car related taxes on transit infrastructure, this place would be the world's eight wonder.
Water, when exposed to vacuum, freezes. It expands when it freezes, sealing any holes made by micro meteorites or space junk
Unless the idea was that the water should be frozen to begin with, I don't get this. To remain liquid in order to later be frozen, it would have to be kept pressurized and heated, right? Exposing it to vacuum would then at least involve a short period of boiling?
So, to summarize, you don't know how to configure your phone to not geotag images, and you are unable to engage your brain before friending someone or posting something on Facebook.
That's it? Really?
You may not be luddites, but you do apparently lack any semblance of social antennas when it comes to picking your friends and choosing what information you share with them (both on Facebook and in real life, it would seem). You don't really state what you have against cell phones (beyond the paranoia that all phones are by default rigged to eavesdrop on you while switched off), so can't really comment on that.
I don't have MailStore on this computer, but if I remember correctly labels are handled as folders. Chats and drafts are just labels I believe, so those should be fine. Conversations as in the way Gmail presents threads? I don't believe MailStore has similar logic for presentation, but could be wrong.
For me, what matters is I have a searchable copy of all my emails, including attachments. If Google explodes, that'll do fine for a save.
Sure, possibly. Assuming the blooper wiped out configuration settings as well as email. But then again, a complete wipe would likely mean the account would be gone as well, so it could just as well be that settings were retained.
A stand-alone application seems the safest way to go. Personally, I use MailStore (free home edition) to ensure a local backup of my Gmail mails.
I suspect offline access via Gears wouldn't help much in this case. It's supposed to stay in sync so I guess logging into an empty account would sync the local gears data into oblivion as well. The same would presumably be true of a local IMAP client (though that could at least be recovered from a backup and then opened in offline mode).
The question seems a bit odd to me. A plan is a subscription for a service in my vocabulary, while a contract in this context is a plan and a "discounted" phone. The contract monthly payment would always be higher than the plan alone, since the contract also includes the down payments for the phone. Where I live, the final sum rarely turns out to be noticeably lower than buying a plan and phone separately.
From your question, I guess the US market doesn't quite function like that and that you can't buy plans separately?
How is that a relevant comparison? When on a contract you've typically put down very little for the phone, and a significant amount of the monthly bill is down payments on the phone itself. To figure out what those extra 50 are paying for, you'd have to compare what's included in each subscription when it comes to minutes and such, as well as the cost of the phone itself.
I prefer to buy my phones separately myself. I'd rather pay for the phone and subscription individually, instead of locking me into contracts where I can read from the small print I'm barely saving anything at all on the cost of the phone anyways.
I assume due to the publishing deals, games are generally more expensive on Steam than in stores where I live. With the exception of the Steam sales, of course.
Result is that if I want a new game, I buy in a store and save 30-40% off the Steam price in many cases. The remainder of my games I buy when Steam does their 50-70% sales.
If spending half your game time running the length of Elwynn Forest is your idea of "earning it", I can only say I disagree. Completely.
MMOs have a nasty tendency to pad game time with copious amounts of traveling. I hate that. Blizzard would seem to agree, and have made getting around quicker and easier for years now (with one exception, the removal of the hub city portals). You get mounts earlier, you get fast mounts earlier, you get flying earlier etc. It's the right thing to do.
I dunno about non-responsive. I was up at midnight and the login servers did bork out, but everything was back to normal half an hour later. I don't think that's too bad, considering the insanely above normal load we're talking about here.
What's your point, precisely? That it's somehow worse to require extra information compared to only what's physically printed on a credit card? If so, I think most would disagree rather strongly with you. Even a simple password verification like that (which I simplified, one also needs information from birth certificate) prevents a stolen card from being used in online stores.
Obviously I prefer my bank's solution (token). But I don't think we're going to get there until the token generators are actually on the cards themselves. Otherwise people will tend to prefer their bank's credit card offerings over others, since "others" would mean having to handle even more token generators.
The tech has been there for years. For any online store supporting verified by visa/mastercard, I'm sent to my bank's authorization page and required to enter my security token's current code and personal password.
For whatever reason though, there are still tons of sites out there that do not support verified by visa/mastercard.
On the other hand, it's only a matter of time before we get cards with built-in token generators. At which point I would expect CC companies to start refusing transactions based on nothing but the printed info on the card.
Plenty of good books/movies have gotten rejected a number of times by "people in the know", only to finally find their way to market and become huge successes.
My opinion is: let the market decide. Let every nimrod out there publish their "epic novel" if they so desire (dare?). We no longer need publishers to filter for us; we are drowning in technology that will handle the crowd sourcing of book rating just fine. The worthwhile reads will gain visibility, while the crud will sink.
I'm not suggesting you go this route if you feel you're making headway the traditional way, of course. You will obviously gain much more visibility by getting picked up by a publisher. For now.
Slashdot Mirror
Were that the case, you'd never need to go online to use a backup of a Steam game on another computer. Heads up, online activation = DRM. Steam = online activation. Personally, I find it acceptable because it doesn't limit the _amount_ of activations, and also because it is fairly weakly implemented. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist though.
And you can't just "purge" third party DRM easily. Were that the case noone would have worried about schemes like Ubisoft's always-online DRM.
See previous line.
"OMG! A game I'd actually like to buy. That doesn't happen very often. It's cheaper on Steam, but I'll pick it up here anyway to support the little guy."
-Not available in your region.
"Right, Steam it is then."
Unless that changes (both of the points), Impulse is going to remain largely irrelevant. It seems they realized this themselves, when they started allowing third party DRM to bring some major titles onboard (though, as mentioned, with region restrictions Steam did not have). It seems rather likely Stardock themselves finally decided it wasn't worth the struggle trying to make a dent in Steam, thus selling it off. Time will tell what Gamestop makes of it, if anything.
Fences is ace though. It's the one title I'd be crying for (Objectdock is nice too, but there are free alternatives to that). Good thing you don't need Impulse for it.
From what I read, it wasn't even question of a binary. The mere presence of a _folder_ with the offending name triggered the AV. That AV's gotto be the new benchmark as far as being crappy goes.
I don't quite get your "safety" connection. In Norway, weight is a component of car taxation, and the weight of safety related equipment is taxed just as much as the weight of any other component in the car. If anything, it's a government incentive to _reduce_ the safety of cars. In addition, the 100%+ taxation on new cars significantly slows the renewal of the car pool, which means many ancient cars (both unsafe and inefficient) keep on roaming the roads.
As far as the government reducing taxation, have you ever seen that happen? Certainly not in Norway. _Especially_ with regards to gasoline taxation (the subject gets political attention any time the prices spike, but since the political consensus is that people should drive less anyway the taxes are kept at their regular 70% or so of pump price).
I don't see how any of this offers insulation from issues in the global economy. Since the govt will never reduce the taxation on fuel, it'll hit us just as hard as anywhere else. Also, I somehow think you'll have a hard time showing the gas prices were what caused the collapse of the US economy.
A major contributor in "saving" Norway from the waves of the recent bout of global financial turmoil, was that the government has more than twice as many employees as all companies exposed to competition combined. Not high fuel prices...
I'd just like to point out, since you bring up Norway, that the fuel (and other car related) taxes are not meant to pay for public transportation and road upkeep, it's just another way to get money into the government coffers. Politically, cars are "bad" and should not be used, thus taxes to try to bring usage down. But, of course, since it's a necessity of life, the only result is that people suck up the cost and use it anyway since the taxes are intentionally kept at a level where that's financially possible for most. The actual income from those taxes are used on everything _except_ transit infrastructure. Whenever (somewhat exaggerated, but not by much) money for an actual road is needed, they build a toll booth to finance it.
If the government actually used all the car related taxes on transit infrastructure, this place would be the world's eight wonder.
Unless the idea was that the water should be frozen to begin with, I don't get this. To remain liquid in order to later be frozen, it would have to be kept pressurized and heated, right? Exposing it to vacuum would then at least involve a short period of boiling?
Facebook fairly recently added an option to always use https.
Twitter announced a few days ago that it was adding the same option. No idea if they've implemented it or just announced it though.
So, to summarize, you don't know how to configure your phone to not geotag images, and you are unable to engage your brain before friending someone or posting something on Facebook.
That's it? Really?
You may not be luddites, but you do apparently lack any semblance of social antennas when it comes to picking your friends and choosing what information you share with them (both on Facebook and in real life, it would seem). You don't really state what you have against cell phones (beyond the paranoia that all phones are by default rigged to eavesdrop on you while switched off), so can't really comment on that.
I don't have MailStore on this computer, but if I remember correctly labels are handled as folders. Chats and drafts are just labels I believe, so those should be fine. Conversations as in the way Gmail presents threads? I don't believe MailStore has similar logic for presentation, but could be wrong.
For me, what matters is I have a searchable copy of all my emails, including attachments. If Google explodes, that'll do fine for a save.
Sure, possibly. Assuming the blooper wiped out configuration settings as well as email. But then again, a complete wipe would likely mean the account would be gone as well, so it could just as well be that settings were retained.
You can export to a number of file formats (Outlook, Thunderbird, plain text files etc), as well dumping it to an IMAP account or via SMTP.
That page doesn't render for me in Firefox or Chrome. View source draws a complete blank as well. Slashdotted or otherwise broken?
A stand-alone application seems the safest way to go. Personally, I use MailStore (free home edition) to ensure a local backup of my Gmail mails.
I suspect offline access via Gears wouldn't help much in this case. It's supposed to stay in sync so I guess logging into an empty account would sync the local gears data into oblivion as well. The same would presumably be true of a local IMAP client (though that could at least be recovered from a backup and then opened in offline mode).
The question seems a bit odd to me. A plan is a subscription for a service in my vocabulary, while a contract in this context is a plan and a "discounted" phone. The contract monthly payment would always be higher than the plan alone, since the contract also includes the down payments for the phone. Where I live, the final sum rarely turns out to be noticeably lower than buying a plan and phone separately.
From your question, I guess the US market doesn't quite function like that and that you can't buy plans separately?
How is that a relevant comparison? When on a contract you've typically put down very little for the phone, and a significant amount of the monthly bill is down payments on the phone itself. To figure out what those extra 50 are paying for, you'd have to compare what's included in each subscription when it comes to minutes and such, as well as the cost of the phone itself.
I prefer to buy my phones separately myself. I'd rather pay for the phone and subscription individually, instead of locking me into contracts where I can read from the small print I'm barely saving anything at all on the cost of the phone anyways.
I assume due to the publishing deals, games are generally more expensive on Steam than in stores where I live. With the exception of the Steam sales, of course.
Result is that if I want a new game, I buy in a store and save 30-40% off the Steam price in many cases. The remainder of my games I buy when Steam does their 50-70% sales.
If you're just trying to scratch a nerd itch, wait.
A lot is going to happen the next few months. This is a really bad time to buy a tablet unless you have a specific need to fill that just can't wait.
IMO, as always.
If spending half your game time running the length of Elwynn Forest is your idea of "earning it", I can only say I disagree. Completely.
MMOs have a nasty tendency to pad game time with copious amounts of traveling. I hate that. Blizzard would seem to agree, and have made getting around quicker and easier for years now (with one exception, the removal of the hub city portals). You get mounts earlier, you get fast mounts earlier, you get flying earlier etc. It's the right thing to do.
I dunno about non-responsive. I was up at midnight and the login servers did bork out, but everything was back to normal half an hour later. I don't think that's too bad, considering the insanely above normal load we're talking about here.
make it built-in Bluetooth support. Sure, not everybody has a phone recent enough to have BT, but that law wouldn't take effect overnight anyways.
If stores universally used it, you better believe people would start remembering their passwords.
What's your point, precisely? That it's somehow worse to require extra information compared to only what's physically printed on a credit card? If so, I think most would disagree rather strongly with you. Even a simple password verification like that (which I simplified, one also needs information from birth certificate) prevents a stolen card from being used in online stores.
Obviously I prefer my bank's solution (token). But I don't think we're going to get there until the token generators are actually on the cards themselves. Otherwise people will tend to prefer their bank's credit card offerings over others, since "others" would mean having to handle even more token generators.
The tech has been there for years. For any online store supporting verified by visa/mastercard, I'm sent to my bank's authorization page and required to enter my security token's current code and personal password.
For whatever reason though, there are still tons of sites out there that do not support verified by visa/mastercard.
On the other hand, it's only a matter of time before we get cards with built-in token generators. At which point I would expect CC companies to start refusing transactions based on nothing but the printed info on the card.
"Not every one is a fan of option x", "some prefer option y".
Different people prefer different things? This is truly revolutionary news. Quick, someone make more than one flavor of ice cream!
Plenty of good books/movies have gotten rejected a number of times by "people in the know", only to finally find their way to market and become huge successes.
My opinion is: let the market decide. Let every nimrod out there publish their "epic novel" if they so desire (dare?). We no longer need publishers to filter for us; we are drowning in technology that will handle the crowd sourcing of book rating just fine. The worthwhile reads will gain visibility, while the crud will sink.
I'm not suggesting you go this route if you feel you're making headway the traditional way, of course. You will obviously gain much more visibility by getting picked up by a publisher. For now.