Where you spend your money is your most important vote, because corporations buy laws. Do you really want Valve to become powerful enough to lobby for more laws to bone people who make digital purchases?
Many people assume that some corporation buying the laws is, as you insinuate, inevitable. For those who care, Valve is not only what they'd think the best bet is, but a legitimately good corporation to do so, considering their stance on many issues.
I can't say I fully agree with them, but many would rather take the devil than can somewhat trust that most others; things like "right to resell" are not a priority for most steam users.
Do they own the trademark in question in every single country in the world? [...] they might have been happy to sell the app in those markets where there's no trademark infringement, but they simply can't, because there's only one channel to get apps to the users on iOS devices.
As an designer who works on iOS games, including one that just had a limited launch only in Canada, I can assure you this is untrue. In fact, many developers do "limited launches" in places like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc to gather metrics before doing a major launch in the states/worldwide. In fact, as a Canadian, I sometimes get screwed over when certain apps (or songs, or videos) are not available in the Canadian store.
Of course, nothing stops developers from selling their app in every country's App Store on the planet if they want. Even if you don't translate it, it can still produce sales, and some cultures have no (or maybe just little) problem with generating sales for english-only games. But the key is that developers do have the choice to only sell in certain countries, so if they don't do their of research (which is of an unreasonable amount for a smaller dev, in some cases), this article is a prime example of what can happen.
There are some exceptions to the digital lock rules (including for law enforcement, interoperability, encryption research, security, privacy, unlocking cellphones, and persons with perceptual disabilities), but these are drafted in a very restrictive manner.
So in terms of converting to something like braille, there's some leeway. Not sure what exactly, but they're at least somewhat trying to look out for people with disabilities.
What normal person wants to carry around about 100 movies all the time?
My mother fills up her iDevices easily, because she has no qualms putting every song and every music video on her device (of course, until she reached the point where she couldn't. Now she needs to swap things around).
Hell, I have over ten gigs of hand-picked OverClocked ReMixes, and that's not counting the gigs of OCR albums I've downloaded and kept or any of my other kinds of music. While I'm a lot more frugal when it comes down to DLing movies, I can easily see a major movie consumer filling that up in about a year (movies are great with a train/bus commute).
As I've noted in a comment above, some people are digital hoarders, and would rather just have things on them at all times, instead of worrying about removing what you don't want and adding what you think you'll want to watch next.
I don't think that, even if you install every single app in the store, you'd hit the 32 Gb limit - not even close.
On the Apple App Store, games can easily hit a gig or more (especially AAA games like Infinity Blade or Rage). While some people don't mind uninstalling and reinstalling apps periodically, a lot of others would rather just have everything on their device at all time, so having more space where software can actually be executed would be useful.
Of course, I'd imagine most people aren't gamers/hoarders, but with even some freemium titles being a third to half a gig, I can see someone getting a large collection going rather fast, even if only downloading chart-topping titles.
I've been needing some good locally-saved reading material in between reading new 40K rules and my fantasy author of choice. I'm willing to back this on spec and hopefully it'll take off (maybe with certain bundles focused on certain types of books, such as sci-fi, or psychology).
Not on stock Android. That has actually annoyed me quite a few times. There are a few apps that can do it, but this should really be standard functionality.
Based on this story, maybe not, even if you're messaging benign things. If your contact list is small enough that it's somehow appropriate to spam everyone you know... well, it's your phone, use it as you want, but I think you're not using the feature to it's fullest.
I did a quick check just in case there was some social movement of which I was unaware and can find no reference to Douglas Adams as "The Bard" outside this thread.
And yet how do you think such titles for people enter popular culture? Via the "Board of Determining Pop Culture Titles for Old White Dead Guys"?
The idea may not succeed, but if it does gain enough traction with just the humble beginnings of someone mentioning it on a message board, then so be it.
I really doubt a contract has any force unless it's signed. A contract has to be agreed, you can't just declare that you have agreed to something by entering a door.
Undoubtably this may vary depending on where you live, but an oral contract (ie something you agree to verbally) can be legally binding, even if hard to enforce. That includes if it is not recorded.
In fact, in many cultures (I think at least in Canada), entering , for example, a restaurant, does have you implicitly agreeing to a contract (in the case of a restaurant, that you will pay according to what you order after you've eaten). Dine-and-dashing is breaking the law at that point.
Then no offense, but your interjection to change the subject of this thread to be about the company was somewhat inappropriate, considering the three posts above yours.
A company is only as good as its employees, and having demotivated employees is not good for any company.
You seem to have a mistaken assumption that his company's employees are his top concern. Considering no one seems to bat an eye at the assumption that he's "set for life", I don't think such altruistic matters concern him in the slightest.
I really dislike ladder-style multiplayer: you're always playing to win and advance to more difficult opponents, and after a point that just stops being fun. Whereas, when playing with my friends, we can do fun stuff like "everybody build up for 10 minutes, then our armies face off in the middle of the map".
In a similar vein to an above comment, it's great that you enjoy that experience of only playing within your social circle, but your preferences (and circumstances) aren't shared by the rest of us. Hell, I'd love to play the new Transformers against a bunch of my friends... but I know exactly 2 guys who have it, and I haven't had a chance to sync up with them online to play even a single match. Getting about a dozen of my closest friends online to play that game is an impossibility, as awesome as it would be for me - certainly, for the few times I've played Halo via LAN, even though I'm terrible at the game, I greatly enjoyed the experience.
Oh don't worry. I'm not saying it's easy (I'm in the industry, so I understand tracking and deleting at this point is tricky)), just that... it'll be hard for anyone from ArenaNet to verify that the profiteers actually deleted "enough".
If I had 33k before the exploit, and I ended up with 100k (not counting anything bought in the mean time), how would ArenaNet know what I should have been at before I started using the exploit? Unless they have very specific and thorough save data journaling (unlikely, considering they aren't reversing things themselves), it seems like subjective guesswork from a customer service drone.
In the case of the specific currency trading (karma to gold), most of the bans from what I've read are temporary ones.
The second link in the article actually indicates that they were permanent bans, but ArenaNet are letting users jump through hoops to convert it into a 72-hour ban. Seems fairly extreme, especially since one of the hoops is "you will delete any items/currency that you gained from the exploit"... which if they can't reverse it themselves, means they probably can't accurately verify how much profit a user should be deleting.
While I'm not the GP, I can certainly answer "No" for myself (and I suspect he'd agree).
This is the point where the sardonic hippies would then add "if you answered yes, you're doing it wrong". Unless you live your life with a specific goal (or I guess lack of any goals), there will always be something more to learn, more to experience, more to create, more to explore...
And the mods are handicapped as all hell. You can't do multiplayer with mods. That includes doing hotseat (ie only one computer is involved) and mods that don't affect gameplay (such as religion names/icons).
Furthermore, from what I understand, Firaxis hasn't explained much for how to properly do anything in the game. It's been out for years, but I don't think anyone has been able to do any total conversions, due to not knowing how to even create substitute nation leaders in the nation screens (best I've seen is one large static image in place of the 3D scene/3D character).
DLC has a place due to being able to expand/change the multiplayer experience, as well as having support for achievements, which it looks like mods will never have.
If your producer and project lead are not complete fucking morons, and actually have a clue about managing an efficient and effective development pipeline, then you've already developed most of the modding tools before you even started to get serious about creating the game content, and the rest got made during the course of development as the needs were discovered.
Funny how this industry often has problems with having producers and project leads not being complete fucking morons...
Presumably, your game designers would benefit from good modding tools as well. [...] If you've provided your game designers with good tools to design their game, this cost is already sunk.
There's a difference between "tools that people can use", and "shit that lets designers get the job done". I'm a game designer who's actually worked on a game that included an in-game level editor. A lot of work is needed to make things work properly on any user's setup, as opposed to getting the job done on a limited set of workstations, which can use hacks and shortcuts that work well to that designer/project/etc as opposed to whatever other platform you're on (and that includes different OSs, hardware, etc).
There's a very big difference between tools that let professionals get the job done, and tools that normal people can use. Don't let that fool you into thinking there's a limited cost to letting end-users use what professionals use.
FieldRunners was one of the first hit tower defense games on iOS, which predates the Android market completely, I believe. Based on the continued polish the game got, it's probably worth checking out, even if you've seen many other games in that genre on the platform.
Loved a lot of the game soundtracks from the previous bundle I got (Bastion, Amnesia, Swords & Sworcery, etc). Haven't heard about much of these games, but since this bundle also includes their soundtracks, can anyone comment to the genre/quality of these games' tunes? I might get it primarily for that.
The complete eradication of anonymous transactions changes the game entirely, and it would alter society in ways that are hard to predict.
The trick is that this doesn't completely eradicate anonymous transactions. If people don't want to be tracked, nothing's stopping them from trading or doing services for a completely different physical currency (such as, say, US Dollars).
Removing physical currency from a region will make some transactions much harder to hide. If you know everyone that does under-the-table stuff is using US Dollars, you can at least stem the tide of such transactions by looking at people who go out of the country/withdraw that kind of cash. But unless a certain critical mass of major countries also follows suit, it will be an inconvenience, not a fully blocking measure.
I don't know what West you're talking about, but in the Edmonton area (where I've lived my entire life), I've never heard anyone talk like that unless they were specifically referring to the coins (rather than the dollar amount).
Hm, perhaps it's more of a BC thing. In the lower mainland, a mix of terminology is used (to the point where you might see a store called "A Buck or Two" advertising items "for as low as a loonie!").
Slashdot Mirror
Where you spend your money is your most important vote, because corporations buy laws. Do you really want Valve to become powerful enough to lobby for more laws to bone people who make digital purchases?
Many people assume that some corporation buying the laws is, as you insinuate, inevitable. For those who care, Valve is not only what they'd think the best bet is, but a legitimately good corporation to do so, considering their stance on many issues.
I can't say I fully agree with them, but many would rather take the devil than can somewhat trust that most others; things like "right to resell" are not a priority for most steam users.
Do they own the trademark in question in every single country in the world? [...] they might have been happy to sell the app in those markets where there's no trademark infringement, but they simply can't, because there's only one channel to get apps to the users on iOS devices.
As an designer who works on iOS games, including one that just had a limited launch only in Canada, I can assure you this is untrue. In fact, many developers do "limited launches" in places like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc to gather metrics before doing a major launch in the states/worldwide. In fact, as a Canadian, I sometimes get screwed over when certain apps (or songs, or videos) are not available in the Canadian store.
Of course, nothing stops developers from selling their app in every country's App Store on the planet if they want. Even if you don't translate it, it can still produce sales, and some cultures have no (or maybe just little) problem with generating sales for english-only games. But the key is that developers do have the choice to only sell in certain countries, so if they don't do their of research (which is of an unreasonable amount for a smaller dev, in some cases), this article is a prime example of what can happen.
From Geist's summary (emphasis mine):
There are some exceptions to the digital lock rules (including for law enforcement, interoperability, encryption research, security, privacy, unlocking cellphones, and persons with perceptual disabilities), but these are drafted in a very restrictive manner.
So in terms of converting to something like braille, there's some leeway. Not sure what exactly, but they're at least somewhat trying to look out for people with disabilities.
What normal person wants to carry around about 100 movies all the time?
My mother fills up her iDevices easily, because she has no qualms putting every song and every music video on her device (of course, until she reached the point where she couldn't. Now she needs to swap things around).
Hell, I have over ten gigs of hand-picked OverClocked ReMixes, and that's not counting the gigs of OCR albums I've downloaded and kept or any of my other kinds of music. While I'm a lot more frugal when it comes down to DLing movies, I can easily see a major movie consumer filling that up in about a year (movies are great with a train/bus commute).
As I've noted in a comment above, some people are digital hoarders, and would rather just have things on them at all times, instead of worrying about removing what you don't want and adding what you think you'll want to watch next.
I don't think that, even if you install every single app in the store, you'd hit the 32 Gb limit - not even close.
On the Apple App Store, games can easily hit a gig or more (especially AAA games like Infinity Blade or Rage). While some people don't mind uninstalling and reinstalling apps periodically, a lot of others would rather just have everything on their device at all time, so having more space where software can actually be executed would be useful.
Of course, I'd imagine most people aren't gamers/hoarders, but with even some freemium titles being a third to half a gig, I can see someone getting a large collection going rather fast, even if only downloading chart-topping titles.
I've been needing some good locally-saved reading material in between reading new 40K rules and my fantasy author of choice. I'm willing to back this on spec and hopefully it'll take off (maybe with certain bundles focused on certain types of books, such as sci-fi, or psychology).
Not on stock Android. That has actually annoyed me quite a few times. There are a few apps that can do it, but this should really be standard functionality.
Based on this story, maybe not, even if you're messaging benign things. If your contact list is small enough that it's somehow appropriate to spam everyone you know... well, it's your phone, use it as you want, but I think you're not using the feature to it's fullest.
I did a quick check just in case there was some social movement of which I was unaware and can find no reference to Douglas Adams as "The Bard" outside this thread.
And yet how do you think such titles for people enter popular culture? Via the "Board of Determining Pop Culture Titles for Old White Dead Guys"?
The idea may not succeed, but if it does gain enough traction with just the humble beginnings of someone mentioning it on a message board, then so be it.
I really doubt a contract has any force unless it's signed. A contract has to be agreed, you can't just declare that you have agreed to something by entering a door.
Undoubtably this may vary depending on where you live, but an oral contract (ie something you agree to verbally) can be legally binding, even if hard to enforce. That includes if it is not recorded.
In fact, in many cultures (I think at least in Canada), entering , for example, a restaurant, does have you implicitly agreeing to a contract (in the case of a restaurant, that you will pay according to what you order after you've eaten). Dine-and-dashing is breaking the law at that point.
(Undoing moderation, sorry.)
Even if this isn't accurate, it made my laugh a little.
I was talking about the company, not Zuckerberg.
Then no offense, but your interjection to change the subject of this thread to be about the company was somewhat inappropriate, considering the three posts above yours.
A company is only as good as its employees, and having demotivated employees is not good for any company.
You seem to have a mistaken assumption that his company's employees are his top concern. Considering no one seems to bat an eye at the assumption that he's "set for life", I don't think such altruistic matters concern him in the slightest.
... is it ok for you to slightly change the meaning of a few cards just to accommodate the experiment?
I think you're missing the part where they're "slightly chang[ing] the meaning of a few cards" via actual Magic cards.
I really dislike ladder-style multiplayer: you're always playing to win and advance to more difficult opponents, and after a point that just stops being fun. Whereas, when playing with my friends, we can do fun stuff like "everybody build up for 10 minutes, then our armies face off in the middle of the map".
In a similar vein to an above comment, it's great that you enjoy that experience of only playing within your social circle, but your preferences (and circumstances) aren't shared by the rest of us. Hell, I'd love to play the new Transformers against a bunch of my friends... but I know exactly 2 guys who have it, and I haven't had a chance to sync up with them online to play even a single match. Getting about a dozen of my closest friends online to play that game is an impossibility, as awesome as it would be for me - certainly, for the few times I've played Halo via LAN, even though I'm terrible at the game, I greatly enjoyed the experience.
Mouse not moose? Was he of the french variety :)?
Well jeeze, I don't think our bottling process is that laid back.
Oh don't worry. I'm not saying it's easy (I'm in the industry, so I understand tracking and deleting at this point is tricky)), just that... it'll be hard for anyone from ArenaNet to verify that the profiteers actually deleted "enough".
If I had 33k before the exploit, and I ended up with 100k (not counting anything bought in the mean time), how would ArenaNet know what I should have been at before I started using the exploit? Unless they have very specific and thorough save data journaling (unlikely, considering they aren't reversing things themselves), it seems like subjective guesswork from a customer service drone.
In the case of the specific currency trading (karma to gold), most of the bans from what I've read are temporary ones.
The second link in the article actually indicates that they were permanent bans, but ArenaNet are letting users jump through hoops to convert it into a 72-hour ban. Seems fairly extreme, especially since one of the hoops is "you will delete any items/currency that you gained from the exploit"... which if they can't reverse it themselves, means they probably can't accurately verify how much profit a user should be deleting.
Are you ever bored on a Saturday afternoon?
While I'm not the GP, I can certainly answer "No" for myself (and I suspect he'd agree).
This is the point where the sardonic hippies would then add "if you answered yes, you're doing it wrong". Unless you live your life with a specific goal (or I guess lack of any goals), there will always be something more to learn, more to experience, more to create, more to explore...
CIV 5 has DLC and MOD's
And the mods are handicapped as all hell. You can't do multiplayer with mods. That includes doing hotseat (ie only one computer is involved) and mods that don't affect gameplay (such as religion names/icons).
Furthermore, from what I understand, Firaxis hasn't explained much for how to properly do anything in the game. It's been out for years, but I don't think anyone has been able to do any total conversions, due to not knowing how to even create substitute nation leaders in the nation screens (best I've seen is one large static image in place of the 3D scene/3D character).
DLC has a place due to being able to expand/change the multiplayer experience, as well as having support for achievements, which it looks like mods will never have.
If your producer and project lead are not complete fucking morons, and actually have a clue about managing an efficient and effective development pipeline, then you've already developed most of the modding tools before you even started to get serious about creating the game content, and the rest got made during the course of development as the needs were discovered.
Funny how this industry often has problems with having producers and project leads not being complete fucking morons...
Presumably, your game designers would benefit from good modding tools as well. [...] If you've provided your game designers with good tools to design their game, this cost is already sunk.
There's a difference between "tools that people can use", and "shit that lets designers get the job done". I'm a game designer who's actually worked on a game that included an in-game level editor. A lot of work is needed to make things work properly on any user's setup, as opposed to getting the job done on a limited set of workstations, which can use hacks and shortcuts that work well to that designer/project/etc as opposed to whatever other platform you're on (and that includes different OSs, hardware, etc).
There's a very big difference between tools that let professionals get the job done, and tools that normal people can use. Don't let that fool you into thinking there's a limited cost to letting end-users use what professionals use.
FieldRunners was one of the first hit tower defense games on iOS, which predates the Android market completely, I believe. Based on the continued polish the game got, it's probably worth checking out, even if you've seen many other games in that genre on the platform.
Loved a lot of the game soundtracks from the previous bundle I got (Bastion, Amnesia, Swords & Sworcery, etc). Haven't heard about much of these games, but since this bundle also includes their soundtracks, can anyone comment to the genre/quality of these games' tunes? I might get it primarily for that.
The complete eradication of anonymous transactions changes the game entirely, and it would alter society in ways that are hard to predict.
The trick is that this doesn't completely eradicate anonymous transactions. If people don't want to be tracked, nothing's stopping them from trading or doing services for a completely different physical currency (such as, say, US Dollars).
Removing physical currency from a region will make some transactions much harder to hide. If you know everyone that does under-the-table stuff is using US Dollars, you can at least stem the tide of such transactions by looking at people who go out of the country/withdraw that kind of cash. But unless a certain critical mass of major countries also follows suit, it will be an inconvenience, not a fully blocking measure.
I don't know what West you're talking about, but in the Edmonton area (where I've lived my entire life), I've never heard anyone talk like that unless they were specifically referring to the coins (rather than the dollar amount).
Hm, perhaps it's more of a BC thing. In the lower mainland, a mix of terminology is used (to the point where you might see a store called "A Buck or Two" advertising items "for as low as a loonie!").