Maybe they turned down the bid because they wanted to stay independent and liked what they did?
Jesus, it drives me crazy listening to people go "what morons, they should have taken the money and ran." Why? What if they really like what they do?
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Foursquare's product or management, and I have this crazy notion that there are things that are worth more than money.
The new system, which NASA uploaded over the past few months, is called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or AEGIS and...
Well, thank god it's gathering increased science. I would hate to think that we were collecting decreased science. Perhaps we could design a program and call it Autonomous System for Scientific and HOlistic Learning and Exploration.
however, health insurance doesn't affect me if you don't have it.
That's not true. By denying someone coverage due to prior conditions or via recission, insurance companies skew the risk pools. When uninsured people show up needing emergency medical care and can't afford to pay it, it drives prices up for everyone who has insurance and can pay.
Okay, this struck me as pretty funny. Mass Effect 2 is pretty conventional for an RPG in that there's a lot of random "break into this wall safe you just happen to be passing by" action. And despite the fact that the game has a classic Bioware "light side / dark side"... no wait, sorry, "Paragon / Renegade" meter, it never seems to budge, no matter how many times you appropriate other people's property.
Normally I'd have overlooked this as just another silly convention of the genre, but there's a scene quite early on in the game where you stumble across a pair of looters ransacking apartments in a part of town gutted by a plague. The looters point out that the residents are mostly dead, and therefore not likely to care. But of course, you get the dialog option that says "No more looting."
It just struck me as funny, considering that on that mission alone, I had already collected a bunch of cash by hacking bank terminals and raiding the coffers of a quasi-legal mercenary group.
DA:O was very good. Mass Effect 2 is uneven - I'm not a big fan of the acting for male Shepard, but the supporting cast is almost uniformly excellent.
Except - oddly - Legion. I don't know what I expected a Geth to sound like, but it ain't him.
The absolute best voice acting I've heard in a game is in Uncharted 2, though. Watch some of the cutscenes if you can. It helps that the writing is also very good.
(Your guy is attempting a stealthy climb up the side of a building. As you reach the edge of the roof, your buddy frantically whispers, "There's a guy above you! There's a guy above you!" When he arrives at the ledge, you pop up, grab him, and hurl him over the side, prompting your friend to follow up with, "There's a guy below you! There's a guy below you!")
On the other hand, Uncharted 2's dialogue is all scripted, which removes the whole "recite this dialogue tree leaf-by-leaf" problem discussed in the original article.
Ugh, Max Payne? The voice acting was terrible! Some of the most leaden, horrible... oh, wait. You meant the game! Yeah, the game voice acting was pretty good.;)
If I recall correctly, there was also a scene in the game where you hear an explosion in the distance, followed by Payne muttering, "What the hell was that?" I smiled every time I heard it because I thought it was so well delivered.
Put another way - most people were perfectly fine paying five bucks for this until they found out where it was physically stored. Why the hell should that make a difference?
It makes a difference because the original software was sold dishonestly as the full game. All else being equal, they should have charged $5 more for the full game content. Essentially the publisher was selling partially unlicensed content.
You keep asserting that it was "dishonestly sold as the full game," but the only explanation I've heard as to why is that there was a for-pay add-on stuck on the media along with it. Nobody seems to think that the game was unplayable without it - in fact, I've heard the opposite criticism, namely that the add-on was too small. And if you're stipulating the part of my post you're quoting, then you've contradicted yourself - if you think the game is broken, you're not likely to be "perfectly fine" paying an additional five bucks for it. And you still haven't answered the obvious question - why the physical location of the files matters.
If a developer creates a game with the express intention of releasing DLC for it, isn't he cheating you by not including it with the original game at the time of its initial release? They could have just pushed back the release date until the DLC was done.
Or hey, here's another version of the same question: let's say the developer had initially planned to finish some DLC after the release of the initial product, but unexpectedly finished ahead of time. The developer now has the choice of including it on the original media for free, including it on the original media for an extra fee, or making it available as DLC for an extra fee. Other than arguing that they should release it for free because it's nice when developers do that, can you explain to me why there's a difference between the second and third option without introducing other assertions about original game not being finished?
Um... no. People can be subpoenaed to testify in court, but documents and records can also be subpoenaed. The difference is that if you are subpoenaed for documents, you are expected to turn them over, whereas if a law enforcement officer obtains a search warrant, he can go take them himself. More or less.
The massive difference between Bioshock 2 and your article is that your demo was free, and you paid to unlock the data. This is spending $60, and then $5 for something that should have been covered under the $60.
You're calling this difference massive, but it's not obvious to me that it is. You think that the expansion should have been covered, but obviously enough people paid money for it that they weren't worried about it. In both of my example cases, I had something sitting on my hard drive, but my access to it was limited until I shelled out an extra five dollars.
Put another way - most people were perfectly fine paying five bucks for this until they found out where it was physically stored. Why the hell should that make a difference? There's plenty of software out there which has "extra functionality" that requires an extra license key to unlock. Or are we going to talk about the immorality of, say, VMware now?
Now, cue the jackasses thinking they did the right thing. I'll cut out my kidney with a disposable drinking straw if anyone can reasonably argue this as ethical.
Sure, I'll bite.
I have an XBL membership. Every once in a while, I download a demo of an XBL Arcade game. The other day I decided I liked the game enough to pay for it, and did so. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the only thing that was actually being downloaded was the activation key - all the code and resources needed to play were already on my hard drive!
So which is worse - me paying top dollar for a game, then another five bucks for a small amount of extra content already on my HD, or paying a few bucks for a smaller game, the entirety of which was already on my HD?
When I think DLC, I think of things that were created or finished after the final release. Maybe things that were meant to be a part of the final product but were left out due to lack of necessity or space constraints (unlikely with Blu-Ray) that would be released through download for free.
Well... I hate to tell you this, but that sounds like your mistake, not theirs.
Nearly 90 percent of IT workers in the UK have said a laptop in their organisation has been reported lost or stolen, new research has found.
Sixty-one percent said that this then resulted in a data breach, according to the '2010 Human Factor in Laptop Encryption Study: United Kingdom', a report produced by the Ponemon Institute for Absolute Software.
I went to Ponemon's home page, but was unable to find the study referenced by the article. Just two questions, though:
What information do we have on the relative sizes of the companies represented by this study? The company I work for (a multinational, but I'm in the US) has close to half a million employees worldwide, more than fifty thousand of whom are in the US. How many people do you poll from my company before "yes, a laptop has been stolen from my organization" ceases to be an interesting question? I looked at a related study Ponemon performed (link to PDF here) and found that in that study, there were a total of 29 organizations sampled.
Second, what constitutes a data breach? Someone accessing a system with protected information? Someone accessing a system with protected information, and actually being able to get to the protected information?
There's just no "there" in this summary.
(By the way - that study I linked to is interesting in its own right. According to Ponemon, respondents who cited a case of laptop theft in which there was a full backup available of the lost system consistently reported the cost of the lost system as higher - perhaps, as Ponemon speculates, because they could determine exactly what was on it when it disappeared. That kind of weird, counter-intuitive relationship is the type of thing that makes me wonder exactly how useful this type of research is.)
Right. So Edna, the sweet octogenarian who volunteered at the local library, calls us because the Internets would stop moving at that branch. Do you really think any of us cared what she thought of us, just so long as we were polite and the problem was resolved?
Anyone smart enough to know that it was a three-pronged plug and call us on it would get an explanation as to why we did it. The one time I know of that it happened, the guy had a good laugh over it.
When I was doing support for a regional ISP, one of my coworkers figured out an ingenious way of forcing a customer to check whether or not a piece of equipment was plugged in. You can't just ask someone, "Can you check to make sure X is plugged in," because they'll say they checked already out of pique. Instead, he would tell them to unplug the power cord and plug in back in again, upside down, and would make up some hooey about how the power cords on these routers were flaky. Of course, the equipment in question always had a three-prong plug, but every once in a while the client would say, "Thanks, that worked!" and we'd know that he was covering to hide the fact that it hadn't been plugged in at all.
They too were young when they saw the original movies - everything is better when you're younger. That's the grandparent's entire point.
Everything is better when you're young. There's plenty of crap that I loved at the age of ten, then viewed again at thirty and found stupid. It's difficult to say the same about things I viewed when I was twenty-seven.
I'm down with the notion that we tend to view the past with rose-colored glasses, et cetera. But it's a lot easier to win over a ten year old with the zoom and the pew-pew than it is to get a thirty year old.
There's an easy test to your theory. Go find some people who saw all of the movies as adults and ask them what they think. So far, everyone I've asked who was an adult for both sets of movies (including a bunch of friends in the office and my dad, a lifelong sci fi fan) thought the original films were much better.
I'm not saying they were masterpieces. But chalking it all up to the audience having grown up is just willfully denying what everybody really knows.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I just can't fathom how this game has gotten the reviews it's gotten. For the 360 there are 42 reviews at gamerankings with the avg score over a 96, and not a single one below a 90... I like it. I think it's an 8. But the flaws I point out are echoed by a lot of players.
So I'm confused - you gave it an 8 out of 10, but you can't fathom how all of these people are giving it a 9?
It seems to me that you agree with the reviews much more than you think.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 1
And now they've adopted an ammo management system, which they could easily work into the story, though it DOES feel like a step backwards.
I think that above everything else, this is the thing that had me asking "why?" Did they feel that the guns in the original were too powerful? It drives me crazy for two reasons: first, because from a story perspective, it asks the player to accept that having what amounts to an infinite supply of fire was unacceptable because they couldn't quite get the shots of fast enough; and second, because being used to having an infinite supply of ammo in other games, I have a tendency to reload reflexively when ducking into cover or at breaks in the action. Now every time I do that, I curse myself for having discarded a nearly-full clip.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they turned down the bid because they wanted to stay independent and liked what they did?
Jesus, it drives me crazy listening to people go "what morons, they should have taken the money and ran." Why? What if they really like what they do?
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Foursquare's product or management, and I have this crazy notion that there are things that are worth more than money.
Well, thank god it's gathering increased science. I would hate to think that we were collecting decreased science. Perhaps we could design a program and call it Autonomous System for Scientific and HOlistic Learning and Exploration.
Then again, we could have called it Rover OS 2.0.
That's not true. By denying someone coverage due to prior conditions or via recission, insurance companies skew the risk pools. When uninsured people show up needing emergency medical care and can't afford to pay it, it drives prices up for everyone who has insurance and can pay.
Okay, this struck me as pretty funny. Mass Effect 2 is pretty conventional for an RPG in that there's a lot of random "break into this wall safe you just happen to be passing by" action. And despite the fact that the game has a classic Bioware "light side / dark side"... no wait, sorry, "Paragon / Renegade" meter, it never seems to budge, no matter how many times you appropriate other people's property.
Normally I'd have overlooked this as just another silly convention of the genre, but there's a scene quite early on in the game where you stumble across a pair of looters ransacking apartments in a part of town gutted by a plague. The looters point out that the residents are mostly dead, and therefore not likely to care. But of course, you get the dialog option that says "No more looting."
It just struck me as funny, considering that on that mission alone, I had already collected a bunch of cash by hacking bank terminals and raiding the coffers of a quasi-legal mercenary group.
Oh hells yes.
I still remember the "flying a captured fighter" mission from FS2. "What, do I look Shivan to you?"
DA:O was very good. Mass Effect 2 is uneven - I'm not a big fan of the acting for male Shepard, but the supporting cast is almost uniformly excellent.
Except - oddly - Legion. I don't know what I expected a Geth to sound like, but it ain't him.
The absolute best voice acting I've heard in a game is in Uncharted 2, though. Watch some of the cutscenes if you can. It helps that the writing is also very good.
(Your guy is attempting a stealthy climb up the side of a building. As you reach the edge of the roof, your buddy frantically whispers, "There's a guy above you! There's a guy above you!" When he arrives at the ledge, you pop up, grab him, and hurl him over the side, prompting your friend to follow up with, "There's a guy below you! There's a guy below you!")
On the other hand, Uncharted 2's dialogue is all scripted, which removes the whole "recite this dialogue tree leaf-by-leaf" problem discussed in the original article.
Ugh, Max Payne? The voice acting was terrible! Some of the most leaden, horrible... oh, wait. You meant the game! Yeah, the game voice acting was pretty good. ;)
If I recall correctly, there was also a scene in the game where you hear an explosion in the distance, followed by Payne muttering, "What the hell was that?" I smiled every time I heard it because I thought it was so well delivered.
You keep asserting that it was "dishonestly sold as the full game," but the only explanation I've heard as to why is that there was a for-pay add-on stuck on the media along with it. Nobody seems to think that the game was unplayable without it - in fact, I've heard the opposite criticism, namely that the add-on was too small. And if you're stipulating the part of my post you're quoting, then you've contradicted yourself - if you think the game is broken, you're not likely to be "perfectly fine" paying an additional five bucks for it. And you still haven't answered the obvious question - why the physical location of the files matters.
If a developer creates a game with the express intention of releasing DLC for it, isn't he cheating you by not including it with the original game at the time of its initial release? They could have just pushed back the release date until the DLC was done.
Or hey, here's another version of the same question: let's say the developer had initially planned to finish some DLC after the release of the initial product, but unexpectedly finished ahead of time. The developer now has the choice of including it on the original media for free, including it on the original media for an extra fee, or making it available as DLC for an extra fee. Other than arguing that they should release it for free because it's nice when developers do that, can you explain to me why there's a difference between the second and third option without introducing other assertions about original game not being finished?
(IANAL)
Um... no. People can be subpoenaed to testify in court, but documents and records can also be subpoenaed. The difference is that if you are subpoenaed for documents, you are expected to turn them over, whereas if a law enforcement officer obtains a search warrant, he can go take them himself. More or less.
You're calling this difference massive, but it's not obvious to me that it is. You think that the expansion should have been covered, but obviously enough people paid money for it that they weren't worried about it. In both of my example cases, I had something sitting on my hard drive, but my access to it was limited until I shelled out an extra five dollars.
Put another way - most people were perfectly fine paying five bucks for this until they found out where it was physically stored. Why the hell should that make a difference? There's plenty of software out there which has "extra functionality" that requires an extra license key to unlock. Or are we going to talk about the immorality of, say, VMware now?
Sure, I'll bite.
I have an XBL membership. Every once in a while, I download a demo of an XBL Arcade game. The other day I decided I liked the game enough to pay for it, and did so. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the only thing that was actually being downloaded was the activation key - all the code and resources needed to play were already on my hard drive!
So which is worse - me paying top dollar for a game, then another five bucks for a small amount of extra content already on my HD, or paying a few bucks for a smaller game, the entirety of which was already on my HD?
Well... I hate to tell you this, but that sounds like your mistake, not theirs.
You weren't the only one who had keeping the spoils from the DLC.
I went to Ponemon's home page, but was unable to find the study referenced by the article. Just two questions, though:
What information do we have on the relative sizes of the companies represented by this study? The company I work for (a multinational, but I'm in the US) has close to half a million employees worldwide, more than fifty thousand of whom are in the US. How many people do you poll from my company before "yes, a laptop has been stolen from my organization" ceases to be an interesting question? I looked at a related study Ponemon performed (link to PDF here) and found that in that study, there were a total of 29 organizations sampled.
Second, what constitutes a data breach? Someone accessing a system with protected information? Someone accessing a system with protected information, and actually being able to get to the protected information?
There's just no "there" in this summary.
(By the way - that study I linked to is interesting in its own right. According to Ponemon, respondents who cited a case of laptop theft in which there was a full backup available of the lost system consistently reported the cost of the lost system as higher - perhaps, as Ponemon speculates, because they could determine exactly what was on it when it disappeared. That kind of weird, counter-intuitive relationship is the type of thing that makes me wonder exactly how useful this type of research is.)
Right. So Edna, the sweet octogenarian who volunteered at the local library, calls us because the Internets would stop moving at that branch. Do you really think any of us cared what she thought of us, just so long as we were polite and the problem was resolved?
Anyone smart enough to know that it was a three-pronged plug and call us on it would get an explanation as to why we did it. The one time I know of that it happened, the guy had a good laugh over it.
When I was doing support for a regional ISP, one of my coworkers figured out an ingenious way of forcing a customer to check whether or not a piece of equipment was plugged in. You can't just ask someone, "Can you check to make sure X is plugged in," because they'll say they checked already out of pique. Instead, he would tell them to unplug the power cord and plug in back in again, upside down, and would make up some hooey about how the power cords on these routers were flaky. Of course, the equipment in question always had a three-prong plug, but every once in a while the client would say, "Thanks, that worked!" and we'd know that he was covering to hide the fact that it hadn't been plugged in at all.
Thanks, but I don't need the hep...
Scared the living crap out of me. It wasn't Alien, but it was damn close.
cede , not seed.
Everything is better when you're young. There's plenty of crap that I loved at the age of ten, then viewed again at thirty and found stupid. It's difficult to say the same about things I viewed when I was twenty-seven.
I'm down with the notion that we tend to view the past with rose-colored glasses, et cetera. But it's a lot easier to win over a ten year old with the zoom and the pew-pew than it is to get a thirty year old.
There's an easy test to your theory. Go find some people who saw all of the movies as adults and ask them what they think. So far, everyone I've asked who was an adult for both sets of movies (including a bunch of friends in the office and my dad, a lifelong sci fi fan) thought the original films were much better.
I'm not saying they were masterpieces. But chalking it all up to the audience having grown up is just willfully denying what everybody really knows.
It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.
Bloom County, how I miss you.
So I'm confused - you gave it an 8 out of 10, but you can't fathom how all of these people are giving it a 9?
It seems to me that you agree with the reviews much more than you think.
I think that above everything else, this is the thing that had me asking "why?" Did they feel that the guns in the original were too powerful? It drives me crazy for two reasons: first, because from a story perspective, it asks the player to accept that having what amounts to an infinite supply of fire was unacceptable because they couldn't quite get the shots of fast enough; and second, because being used to having an infinite supply of ammo in other games, I have a tendency to reload reflexively when ducking into cover or at breaks in the action. Now every time I do that, I curse myself for having discarded a nearly-full clip.
Basically it's a Kindle DX, only with color, games, a touchscreen, and its own office suite. The base model is ten dollars more than the DX.