I haven't had to deal with that issue. For specific problems of software quality, I see it as more the developer's problem than Valve's.
At any rate... there is something you can do. Buy your games with a credit card, and if you feel like Valve has screwed you over, call the card company and cancel the payment. It's called a "charge back" and people who know about it do it constantly to software companies. At least one developer/publisher I worked at allocated a strong percentage of their income for paying them.
Steam isn't just an interface It replaces the role of the brick and mortar store, as well as the role of the CD/DVD media. It also acts as a library of games and their mods, and provides anti-cheating features (if developers choose to use them). So rather than feeling like Steam is just "one more interface" standing between me any my possessions, I tend to think of it as a merchant who sticks around to organize and update my games.
Long term, I see Steam as the big rival to iTunes. I think they'll eventually start to carry movies, and eventually music too.
And as I've said before, I don't think PC gaming will ever have a chance to die. The line between consoles + TVs and PCs + monitors is very fuzzy even today (the XBOX and XBOX360 are already basically x86 PCs running Windows 2000), and in five or ten years it will disappear completely.
A friend of mine came to me when she found disparaging things were posted about her on one of the Topix threads, and wanted me to help her to use her debit card to pay for having it removed. Being unfamiliar with Topix's extortion, I was naturally very surprised to see that they offered this "expedited investigation" or whatever it was called. I convinced her to wait a few days and see whether the normal channel of removal worked.
Oddly enough, it did work. I was able to flag the post over the course of a couple of days, and it was eventually removed. So don't say that they *never* removed posts based on the free system. They did at least once.
In some ways it doesn't matter if he's never convicted of these charges. Mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh will be able to call him a "rapist and molester" and convince many that any information from Wikileaks is a lie.
That doesn't seem like a great reason to decide against using trains, but I think you have a point. If a government funded national system were developed it would only be fair to include some kind of smoking car or other reasonable accommodation.
What about my statement suggested that *everyone* should use be forced to use a breathalyzer?
If you had read my statement more carefully, you would have seen that I suggested their presence in all new cars, *so that they're more likely to be widely used as punishment for those who drive drunk*.
I'm also against unreasonable or unjust searches. The Constitution is very important to me. But drunk driving is an extremely danger and selfish crime and anyone who is convicted of it should be forced to prove their sobriety before driving.
If they're cheap, they should be built in, and would be available more easily for punishment for DUIs, or for parents to check up on their kids, etc.
Driving drunk is like recklessly firing a gun in a sparsely crowded area. It should be punished with extremely strict terms, and a simple behavior enforcement device like a breathalyser in a car is a great punishment, including for first time offenders.
Oh man, thank you. I despise how people act as though the slippery slope is a fallacy rather than a principle. For all the reasons you listed, terrible changes come about in small movements, and yet parrot-like pseudo intellectuals will always bring this "fallacy" out to stud when they need to deny the obvious.
Another of these silly games that I REALLY hate is Occam's Razor (at least as used in practice) . It's frustrating to have someone wave that stupid banner, when the "simplest explanation" is as much a matter of opinion as the original point of contention.
How does pushing content through a few major sites help spread it in censored areas? It seems like an authoritarian government could ban a few major websites more easily than hundreds of smaller ones.
Maybe a torrent-like web server would be best for sharing censored information, where trusted web servers in free countries are the only uploaders on the network.
I know it might sound silly, but I would try to keep some good samples of her DNA.
Your wife's DNA may contain some beneficial medical information for your daughters, and it may help them to have access to it later on. Further out there, you never know what we may be able to do with DNA in 20 years. It doesn't seem impossible that DNA could be used to generate 3D portraits of deceased people. Imagine if your grand daughters could someday move a slider around on a computer, and see grandma as a child, then move it again, and see how grandma might have looked had she lived to be 80 years old.
You said "American society has been whipped into a paranoid, trigger happy frenzy by 24 hour propaganda on film and tv."
That's such bullshit. Most Americans have always seen guns as just another cool, dangerous tool, like a power saw or dynamite. Teenagers and foreigners are the only people who buy into the bullshit about guns from the American media. It's a fantasy, like porn, and adult Americans know this.
Many, maybe even most, of the people in my area own guns, and almost all of them treat them with the utmost respect and care. None of them are trying to recreate The Matrix with their deer rifles.
The graphics in Torchlight are a product of the art and rendering techniques they decided to use. They wanted reasonable graphic quality and the ability for low-powered computers to run the game.
The look of their game has everything to do with art and marketing, and basically nothing to do with any limitation on Ogre's part. They could have used ultra complex geometry, normal maps and subsurface scattering, and Ogre would have happily provided it.
Torchlight was built using Ogre3D, an open source graphics rendering engine. I hope that the sequel uses it too.
Ogre3D is written in C++ and is compatible with PC, Linux, Mac, iPhone, Android and other platforms. If you're into programming 3D games or simulations, you should definitely check it out. www.ogre3d.org
(I'm a long time user of Ogre3D but otherwise unaffiliated)
The worst offenses in the Vietnam war don't necessarily tell us about the humanity of all veterans, especially not 35 years later.
Do you really think that he would approve of burning children, in games or in real life? Your comment is stupid. Not every Vietnam veteran is guilty of war crimes. For all you know, my father-in-law might have been a surgeon who was drafted into medical service.
I agree that clearly my father-in-law interpreted those pixels as "men", but to me they are just game pieces. I feel no more sympathy for their virtual fate than I feel for that of a chess piece.
So while I could have or should have considered his perspective on the game, there's nothing "a little off" about my outlook.
My father-in-law is a Vietnam vet. Anyway, he's surprisingly into video games for a guy his age, and he likes the Call of Duty style games. As far as I can tell he doesn't find it uncomfortable at all to play war games.
I did find one aspect of war games that upset him. He watched me playing Call of Duty or some game like that, and I was playing the offline campaign. A bunch of allied AI troops were in my way and I shot them down while laughing. He said that I, or maybe just my actions, were "sick" and said something else about how you shouldn't fire on your own guys, then got up and left the room.
I read that as "Inuit still fighting tax software" and had prepared myself for an amazing story of Eskimo software standards. Imagine my disappointment.
And if there's one thing attendees of Black Hat respect, it's intellectual property... oh wait.
Ordinarily I'd say pirating video streams is morally questionable, but hacking access to the video stream of a security conference is so poetic that I refuse to believe it could be evil.
Technically, the summary says that the economy of scale factor won't be initiated by the current incentives. I'm with you though. I'm skeptical (without reading TFA) that the suggestion is true.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember "embrace" and "extend", but I can't seem to remember the third phase...
I haven't had to deal with that issue. For specific problems of software quality, I see it as more the developer's problem than Valve's.
At any rate... there is something you can do. Buy your games with a credit card, and if you feel like Valve has screwed you over, call the card company and cancel the payment. It's called a "charge back" and people who know about it do it constantly to software companies. At least one developer/publisher I worked at allocated a strong percentage of their income for paying them.
Steam isn't just an interface It replaces the role of the brick and mortar store, as well as the role of the CD/DVD media. It also acts as a library of games and their mods, and provides anti-cheating features (if developers choose to use them). So rather than feeling like Steam is just "one more interface" standing between me any my possessions, I tend to think of it as a merchant who sticks around to organize and update my games.
Long term, I see Steam as the big rival to iTunes. I think they'll eventually start to carry movies, and eventually music too.
And as I've said before, I don't think PC gaming will ever have a chance to die. The line between consoles + TVs and PCs + monitors is very fuzzy even today (the XBOX and XBOX360 are already basically x86 PCs running Windows 2000), and in five or ten years it will disappear completely.
Domestic terrorism against a typical government wouldn't do a thing to improve it. If anything it might cause retribution against the people.
A friend of mine came to me when she found disparaging things were posted about her on one of the Topix threads, and wanted me to help her to use her debit card to pay for having it removed. Being unfamiliar with Topix's extortion, I was naturally very surprised to see that they offered this "expedited investigation" or whatever it was called. I convinced her to wait a few days and see whether the normal channel of removal worked.
Oddly enough, it did work. I was able to flag the post over the course of a couple of days, and it was eventually removed. So don't say that they *never* removed posts based on the free system. They did at least once.
I said people LIKE Rush WILL be able to do this. Not that SPECIFICALLY Rush HAS done something.
I guess years of listening to Rush makes even his listeners talk/think in dishonest ways.
In some ways it doesn't matter if he's never convicted of these charges. Mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh will be able to call him a "rapist and molester" and convince many that any information from Wikileaks is a lie.
That doesn't seem like a great reason to decide against using trains, but I think you have a point. If a government funded national system were developed it would only be fair to include some kind of smoking car or other reasonable accommodation.
Yes, only required in the event of a DUI conviction, but present in all autos (if they're cheap enough) so that it encourages their use.
I think if you read my original message again you'll see my point.
What about my statement suggested that *everyone* should use be forced to use a breathalyzer?
If you had read my statement more carefully, you would have seen that I suggested their presence in all new cars, *so that they're more likely to be widely used as punishment for those who drive drunk*.
I'm also against unreasonable or unjust searches. The Constitution is very important to me. But drunk driving is an extremely danger and selfish crime and anyone who is convicted of it should be forced to prove their sobriety before driving.
Nice try Mark, but I think the board's decision is final.
If they're cheap, they should be built in, and would be available more easily for punishment for DUIs, or for parents to check up on their kids, etc.
Driving drunk is like recklessly firing a gun in a sparsely crowded area. It should be punished with extremely strict terms, and a simple behavior enforcement device like a breathalyser in a car is a great punishment, including for first time offenders.
Oh man, thank you. I despise how people act as though the slippery slope is a fallacy rather than a principle. For all the reasons you listed, terrible changes come about in small movements, and yet parrot-like pseudo intellectuals will always bring this "fallacy" out to stud when they need to deny the obvious.
Another of these silly games that I REALLY hate is Occam's Razor (at least as used in practice) . It's frustrating to have someone wave that stupid banner, when the "simplest explanation" is as much a matter of opinion as the original point of contention.
How does pushing content through a few major sites help spread it in censored areas? It seems like an authoritarian government could ban a few major websites more easily than hundreds of smaller ones.
Maybe a torrent-like web server would be best for sharing censored information, where trusted web servers in free countries are the only uploaders on the network.
I know it might sound silly, but I would try to keep some good samples of her DNA.
Your wife's DNA may contain some beneficial medical information for your daughters, and it may help them to have access to it later on. Further out there, you never know what we may be able to do with DNA in 20 years. It doesn't seem impossible that DNA could be used to generate 3D portraits of deceased people. Imagine if your grand daughters could someday move a slider around on a computer, and see grandma as a child, then move it again, and see how grandma might have looked had she lived to be 80 years old.
You said "American society has been whipped into a paranoid, trigger happy frenzy by 24 hour propaganda on film and tv."
That's such bullshit. Most Americans have always seen guns as just another cool, dangerous tool, like a power saw or dynamite. Teenagers and foreigners are the only people who buy into the bullshit about guns from the American media. It's a fantasy, like porn, and adult Americans know this.
Many, maybe even most, of the people in my area own guns, and almost all of them treat them with the utmost respect and care. None of them are trying to recreate The Matrix with their deer rifles.
The graphics in Torchlight are a product of the art and rendering techniques they decided to use. They wanted reasonable graphic quality and the ability for low-powered computers to run the game.
The look of their game has everything to do with art and marketing, and basically nothing to do with any limitation on Ogre's part. They could have used ultra complex geometry, normal maps and subsurface scattering, and Ogre would have happily provided it.
Torchlight was built using Ogre3D, an open source graphics rendering engine. I hope that the sequel uses it too.
Ogre3D is written in C++ and is compatible with PC, Linux, Mac, iPhone, Android and other platforms. If you're into programming 3D games or simulations, you should definitely check it out. www.ogre3d.org
(I'm a long time user of Ogre3D but otherwise unaffiliated)
The worst offenses in the Vietnam war don't necessarily tell us about the humanity of all veterans, especially not 35 years later.
Do you really think that he would approve of burning children, in games or in real life? Your comment is stupid. Not every Vietnam veteran is guilty of war crimes. For all you know, my father-in-law might have been a surgeon who was drafted into medical service.
I agree that clearly my father-in-law interpreted those pixels as "men", but to me they are just game pieces. I feel no more sympathy for their virtual fate than I feel for that of a chess piece.
So while I could have or should have considered his perspective on the game, there's nothing "a little off" about my outlook.
My father-in-law is a Vietnam vet. Anyway, he's surprisingly into video games for a guy his age, and he likes the Call of Duty style games. As far as I can tell he doesn't find it uncomfortable at all to play war games.
I did find one aspect of war games that upset him. He watched me playing Call of Duty or some game like that, and I was playing the offline campaign. A bunch of allied AI troops were in my way and I shot them down while laughing. He said that I, or maybe just my actions, were "sick" and said something else about how you shouldn't fire on your own guys, then got up and left the room.
I read that as "Inuit still fighting tax software" and had prepared myself for an amazing story of Eskimo software standards. Imagine my disappointment.
And if there's one thing attendees of Black Hat respect, it's intellectual property... oh wait. Ordinarily I'd say pirating video streams is morally questionable, but hacking access to the video stream of a security conference is so poetic that I refuse to believe it could be evil.
Technically, the summary says that the economy of scale factor won't be initiated by the current incentives. I'm with you though. I'm skeptical (without reading TFA) that the suggestion is true.
Actually I'm a PC game developer...