The course itself might list as "web course online nuclear power plant operations" or the like. But as universities if we offer a degree programme, it carries the 'full weight of a regular course' so to speak. If that wasn't the case very quickly online courses would have to disappear from universities, because we cannot be offering things which aren't seen as legitimate to our reputations and our ultimate customer base which is the general public.
Now, if you're in the US and want to go to a online degree factory, well, then you're going to get what you'd expect, and I'm sure some places are sketchier than others, if you can't tell if a place is legit, neither can a prospective employer.
Probably not really. The smalled fortune 500 companies, D.R. Horton and Seaboard both have over 3000 employees (and seaboard is up around 9k), with even that many computers it would be fairly hard to be 100% sure all of them are clean all the time, especially across multiple sites and all that.
Officially, and probably unofficially, they want a diverse set of suppliers. India isn't in bed with Russia the way it has been for years. They have a joint fighter the SU-30MKI which is a damn good aircraft relatively, but they don't want to be seen as purely on the russian side in the arms markets. When you're as big as india you want to make sure you have friends in a lot of places. Who knows what the russians are going to be doing in the next 15 or 20 years, and they don't want to be tied to one supplier.
Depends on whether or not pakistan gets F16's, whether or not india wishes to involve itself with Iran, or anywhere else in the middle east, what the situation in Indonesia or burma may do to future indian interests, and chinese interests.
When you're buying aircraft for the next 15 or 20 years you have a lot of broad 'what if's' to consider beyond just the immediately obvious threats. A radical shakeup in the middle east or indonesia or even pakistan or burma could leave india very much in need of operational capability quickly if it wants to be taken seriously as a major power.
And the french are selling rafales with a technology transfer. Same deal they had with Brazil. The Eurofighter was the best fighter in the competition, but no technology transfer at the same level (manufacturing exchange though). The french spent some absurd amount of money developing the Rafale ( I think 40 billion euros, which works out to 200 million per aircraft for france). They're desperate to recoup some of those costs, otherwise the Rafale, which is a decent but not spectacular aircraft is looking at a per unit cost comparable to the f22.
The rafale isn't really older. It's 12 years old now from first introduction, but it's still in production, and only a 5 year older design than the F22. It's a 4.5 gen fighter, superior to an F16, F18, about on par with an F18 super hornet, inferior to a Eurofighter or F22 or the not yet available f35.
Oh, I meant before submission. If you realize a reviewer is going to tell you to do a better literature review it's probably a good idea to do that before you send in the paper. Then we're back to discussing what really warrants being cited and how.
There's a tricky balance between saying we build on this work and so necessarily reference it, and it is related to this other work (or may incorporate results from it, even if I'm not directly involved in that research) which is trying to give credit where it is due, not too much.
Science struggles how to cite widely disbursed facts. What is the speed of light? Right. You *can* cite the people who precisely measure it, but most research that relies on that data doesn't really need to cite it, because they aren't building on it. If I'm looking at spectra from a gas or a star the speed of light is really really really important to my work, but how the actual number was arrived at isn't that important. If you're a young researcher you want your work to look like it is related to a lot of things (think resume padding) so you cite more than you need to, and if you're new to the field you want your work cited as a measure how much impact it has - but judging what counts as impact is not always clear and you're pretty easy to persuade that it is better to over cite than under cite and risk being called out for plagiarism.
Another example. I'm working on a current project. One of the relevant facts to the work is the history of the Bismarck battleship (the nazi one). This is because the documentation about the history is relevant to how to quantify the statistics of the ship. But what is a valid reference for that? If anything? How about the mere existence of the ship? What factual information am I digging for that isn't sufficiently well known to be on wikipedia? Do I cite comparable information about the dozen or so other ships and aircraft she actually fought with, or do I just sort of take for granted that the ship had 38 cm guns (which directly maps to the problem I'm talking about which is balancing the relative combat power of the ship). If it was a history paper it's sort of obvious that the historical work is to be cited - discovering (or rediscovering) that information would be a worthwhile historical paper, but what about something that is only tangentially related, which is trying to define those statistics in a game?
It hasn't been uncommon for scientists to base research on 3 or 4 papers (possibly one or two of which was from their own group), and then when they're getting ready to publish to look for papers in the target journal that are related that can be cited as well (this is like self censorship, or self coercion, rather than be asked to do it, you do it on your own first0. It's not really a good practice, but I'm not sure it's as bad as the article tries to make it out to be. You really are legitimately looking for work that might be related to what you did, especially if you didn't do your literature search very well (which is harder than it sounds sometimes), and you are, as you say, citing authors you're extrapolating from (or at the very least doing related work to).
Don't misunderstand "I was talking to a guy on the street and wasn't quite sure" with "The son of the leader of a country, who is now the leader of that country", and with whom several states have relations, including china....
My father was born in india somewhere around 1941. No one is sure when, and my grandfather only passed away last year so he had the last 70 years in which he could never remember exactly, so we don't know. Back then in india you used a Lunar calendar if you were not attached to the So you pick a date and roll with it as the 'official' date and hope it is close enough. But that is a relatively unimportant guy in an unimportant town in the 1940's. With the leader of north korea you'd think he'd have an official birthday (even if it's in a lunar calendar) somewhere that someone would know.
I grant that they may have never bothered to publicize it, because as something like the 3rd son of the dear leader might not have been considered all that important to hereditary succession they didn't want to aggrandize him early and risk a coup or something. But that whole situation goes to my point of "odd".
Given they already have a covert nuclear programme doing covert experiments isn't that much of a shock. But really, everything these guys do is odd to some degree, I mean, they have a leader who was born in any of 1982, 83 or 84 and no one seems quite clear as to which. Or why they would lie about it.
It's not even clear who these outlandish lies are for, which is what makes the whole thing odd. Even if it's just misdirection to confuse anyone trying to find out the truth that doesn't make it any less odd.
Actually I started with the trivial case, and expanded to the more sophisticated one. None of them are mutually exclusive, and none of which was a rant. If you can accept that you are due to be paid for work you did even though you're dead, then we're arguing a matter of degree.
You (assuming you're the same AC as before) are jumping from MJ, John lennon and Team Bondi, all of which have immediate survivors (ex wives, children, notably, junior children in the case of MJ, the actual people) to 150 years. That's a bit of a stretch.
I put it in the frame of 'what would I be legally obligated to, and would I reasonably be able to collect payments for if I were still alive'. A corporation is a somewhat messier problem because they are legally obliged indefinitely, and naturally anyone with a brain would want to try and transfer copyright to a corporation or similar if that was an advantage.
If a 26 year old does good work, and no one discovers it's value until they are 65 (so there has been no commercial value to it for that time) should they suddenly not profit from it because it's been too long? That seems a tad unfair. My thesis is my thesis, just as my house is my house, I'm not really fond of the idea that I could ever lose rights over work I did just because the time has expired, and I'm not really fond of the idea that underage children could equally lose out for the same reason. If my work has value - either as a contract work for hire for someone else, or oh its own to be copyrighted it shouldn't magically expire. A company I was tangentially interacting with just lately discovered that it had never paid employees for a particular day. Ever. (if date the same number problem). So you dig back through your employee records for 10 years, and pay people (and some lawyers because obviously it's a bit more complicated than that). That only seems right. Even if the work I did took an hour when I was 5, it was still my work and I should be paid the entire value of that work, either per hour or as long as it generates money. The question of beyond that, which right now in the EU and I think US is life of author + 70 years. I'm not sure you really need more than that (or even that much really). But again, that's arguing degree. If you don't think you or or your estate should get paid for work you did a long time ago then we're going to have trouble having a discussion at all. I know music is different than general copyright and there's probably a sweet spot between music at whatever it is, 50 years I think, and life + 70. But in any case, the 3 examples you cited, I come down on the side of the beatles should still have ownership of their music, MJ's kids should have ownership of his, and Team Bondi employees should still get paid whatever they can from sales of LA noire.
If you want a more dramatic case, something like Lord of the Rings... which just made what, 6 billion dollars despite it having been written in the 1920's by a guy who died in the 1970's is a bit murkier. It would seem woefully unfair that you could simply wait 30 more years and not have to pay his heirs a penny of 6 billion dollars that owes itself to him, and yet doing that to Gilbert and Sullivan which is only from 40 years before Tolkien wrote LOTR would not seem unreasonable, so maybe I am biased by an exceptional case (or maybe the law should explicitly deal with the diminishing value of copyright over time).
For your hours worked, yes. If I die feb 27th I expect my employer to pay my estate for all of the wages I earned to that point, and if I am due monies later for the work done in that period (say the contract isn't paid until june) my estate would still get paid for my portion of the work.
If my estate, which at that point is transfered to someone else (who may have legally paid for my services such that my work was work for hire for them) they may continue to be paid for that work even though I'm long since dead. My work is also never entirely my own. Michael Jackson and John Lennon are good examples. If they had gotten divorces rather than died they would still be obliged to pay child support and alimony up until today. Michael jackson was not the only person who contributed to his music. All of his investors, his spouse(s), other employees etc. He is credited with having been the guy on stage, but for him to be there hundreds of other people are involved.
Should you have to pay less for a car if one of the designers died 3 years ago even though they were paid by GM?
As to L.A. Noire. The studio is shuttered but money you pay *does* go to the studio. It didn't disappear. It still exists as a legal entity with debts (that's why they went out of business), and that money goes to the artists who are still owed back wages, the owners or investors who paid the artists in the first place to make it. As of october 75% of Team Bondi debts were to former employees who weren't paid. So not paying for the game is a giant fuck you to those guys who made the game and never got paid for it, when if you did pay for the game that money would be disbursed to them. The publisher (Rockstar) who contributed to the actual making of the game, paid team bondi and participated heavily in development also would get money which they are entitled to.
How do you think the basically bankrupt interplay stays afloat? People keep buying baulders gate etc. on gog.com or similar and that gives them a trickle of revenue.
More like the other way around. If they're IPOing this late they should have a solid balance sheet already. that makes it good for everyday investors and bad for high risk, high return ones. For every facebook that should have spent the last 8 years getting its business plan in order along with customers and so on there are 100 never heard ofs that took VC, and imploded. Facebook *should*, even if their balance sheet isn't great, have a plan on how to convert that IPO money into revenue, which is what people would be investing on. And if you can't figure out how facebook is going to collect 50 billion dollars a year in revenue, you should be very skeptical of valuing them at 100 billion dollars (which is just less than half the size of IBM or HP).
Everyday investors want to own banks and GE. Boring companies that pay boring dividends and have boring stock price growth. People who have money to lose want to invest in apples and amazons. Because how close did apple shareholders come to having nothing? Right. How many not quite amazons have disappeared into oblivion?
Arguably apple, with their 100 billion dollars cash on hand is a better 'everyday' investor bet than facebook, since Apple can pay out 20-25% of its shareholder value in a dividend tomorrow if it wants to. Facebook could get crushed under the weight of privacy rules all around the world or god knows what, and they have nothing of value to cough up to shareholders if they start faltering.
Memory on consoles is a different baby completely than on PC. On a console you know exactly how quickly you can pull data in from the optical drive, and have a good idea about the hard drive. On the PC you figure most people have a couple of gigs of RAM, so you may as well use it, and you have no control over what else is using those resources on the system, so you're better to use RAM than to rely on disk access. You also have very different memory space requirements with the GPU (you might be mirroring your data between GPU and CPU memory, that sort of thing).
And yes, memory can matter a lot, that's usually textures. I always figured the easiest thing sony could have done to make the PS3 better was to swap the notebook hard drives for a desktop drive, and use the cost difference to put in 1 gig of memory rather than 512, which would have made developers have something they could point to as much easier to manage than the xbox.
But when you're actually developing on a console, you absolutely have to keep track of everything going into memory, and you are damn sure why it's there, but you also are 100% sure what every PS3 or Xbox2 will have for memory. On PC you have so much memory, and you might have been a nub and not set the right compiler options etc. but you just use the memory because it's there.
I'm not sure you're entirely on base, but you've got the right idea.
If OP wanted to take software engineering, he should have taken software engineering, not CS. They rely on much the same in basic skills but they are different things. A MSc in comp sci isn't supposed to be a programmer who's taken 10 extra courses. You're supposed to actually do, well, science. It is real work, it is the technical architect behind the system, the technical director who figures out what problems can be solved by the tech school staff, the person who develops a novel or efficient solution a problem quickly hacked together by someone who didn't really appreciate algorithm efficiency, that sort of thing. Being an IT guy is not CS. Being a professional scientist is about using a scientific process and knowledge kit to apply to a problem domain (computing in this case), so error and failure rates, efficient algorithm that sort of thing. Efficient algorithms and representations of data is a big area of CS since it sort of encompasses languages (is it easier or harder to efficiently implement an algorithm in a particular language, why?), the tradeoffs etc. You're an expert in what data is, and what you can do it, whereas a software engineer is an expert in how to use a computer to solve a problem with data. If you trained in one expect a period of retraining to do the other, they aren't mutually exclusive but the are separate and somewhat complimentary.
I teach both SE and CS students. Because there is a LOT of overlap, and you can learn in CS SE skills, but the emphasis on the typically individual responsibility of a scientist vs the collective responsibility of an engineering project aren't the same. If you get a job it's up to them to teach you the area you are deficient in, SE's are usually good at designing a system and hacking it together to work, CS is there to make it efficient or to figure out how to solve a novel problem even if they aren't the one implementing it, or figure out what problem is even solvable (whereas the SE is concerned with whether or not the solution is implementable).
I realize the US is casual with the use of language here. But if you're a scientist you're not an engineer. If you have an MA you aren't an engineer. If you have an MBA you aren't an engineer. You can become an engineer with training after the fact, but if you wanted to be an engineer you should have been an engineer.
I wouldn't consider 'open source' as work in the same way as real work is. Volunteering to help build a house uses a lot of skills like being paid to build a house. But the 'on time, on budget, with the co-workers we choose for you, not the ones we want, on the hours we tell you' is a a different environment. If you can get an MSc in comp sci you don't need to 'work' experience of open source particularly (nor would you necessarily want to give the impression you're willing to work for free).
And you see old code everywhere. Academia is full of it, because someone wrote code to solve a similar problem to this 10 years ago, and you're using it now and it's been 'maintained' by 5 other grad students who've all long since left, and you're stuck with it now. Industry is full of it 'because it works', and government is full of it because they can't get money to put in something new even if they want to, or they put money into a politicians pet project that had nothing to do with the requirements of the actual problem.
The market is changing, and the reviewer is reflecting that. People don't want to spend 600 dollars on a top end card, even if 5 years ago the 'top end' cost 800 dollars (or whatever it was).
The perception is (rightly or wrongly) that all of these things should be getting faster and cheaper at the same time. That's not entirely wrong, but it's not entirely right either. A die shrink should mean lower cost for the chip itself, depending on yields but has nothing to do with any of the other parts on the PCB, market pressures or the like. (And the reviewer probably knows AMD has the price jacked up a bit because they probably haven't moved more than 10k units of the top end card right now and are trying to get as much money as they can from them before launching other things at a lower price).
Game what at 1080p? 4 year old games? 1080p is a resolution (1920x1080) and a frequency, it says nothing about the quality of the image being drawn, it just clearly defines the size and refresh of the image. You could run the original Xcom at 1080p on a 25 dollar air cooled card, but that's not what you mean is it?
If you want to play Arkam city with something close to max settings at 1080p you need a better card than the 5750. If you're willing to take crappy settings then it *might* be possible for an air cooled 7000 series card to do that, barely. But don't expect an air cooled card anytime soon.
The way this works is every chip is a 7970 to start, and then the not perfect ones are 7950's, the ok ones will be 7800's the crappy ones 7500's the horrible ones 7200's (air cooled), and they won't ship those in volume any time soon, and even then you're not really looking at the right product. Air cooled cards are for really really really basic machines and they only sell air cooled cards to avoid junking those parts, they aren't intended for anything 3d let alone gaming.
That's what happens though. Expect that the Xbox 3, PS4 will have something on par with a 7000 series Radeon or 600 series (not yet commercial) nvidia card, at which point, to keep up with a console you'll need something new ( I don't have any insider information here, but that would be consistent with the projected timelines and everything that has happened in the past).
That's how the market has worked for a long time. The consoles come in and converge performance parity to PC's by being sold at a loss for a while, then the price of parts drop, the PC moves on technology wise, but only a few titles that are really invested in the PC take advantage of it, eventually enough stuff comes out on the PC that makes the tech in consoles show its limitations (and this is where GPGPU comes in handy, for things like cloth and smoke it's much easier to do gpgpu than to do cell work) and then the console guys have to play catch up for a while.
Off the top of my head nothing jumps out at me that's mainstream that you just could not do on a console right now (performance wise). Some of the more complex strategy games, and obviously the controls for MMO's that kind of thing, but I could pretty easily spit out a demo on a 7000 series GPU that just plain could not be done on consoles, AMD actually has a professional quality demo, called "leo.mov" (which I seem to have lost the link for) that's about 400 mb that shows of stuff you can't do on a console but it's more of a marketing tool for the 7000 series than a great tech demo. The problem is, that wouldn't work on just about anything else on the market either.
Steams hardware survey is illustrative of the market. About 48% of gaming pc's have dual core, another 43% quad core, and then 'other' (which are probably going to be largely developers or people with rigs for something else that happen to also be used for gaming at 6 and 8 core, and the 5% of the market on single core are likely laptops or people with old and broken pcs). So we're a long ways off from the 'mainstream' PC market being way better than a console. Which is why all you get are console ports.
Well that and AMD nVIDIA and Intel have been working on more cores and not radically new tech lately. Sure, you could, for not a lot of money, easily get a card 4x the performance of your 4850 (a decent 6000 series) or better, but there's only so much visual fidelity to be added compared to being able to supply your little display vs a 2560x1600 (or triple monitor or the like).
The tax situation is why gold selling is almost always frowned upon. If it had a legitimate exchange to real world money you might have the tax any gains (sort of depends on the rules around gambling income wherever you live). It would get very ugly very fast.
Consistently not, using a song in a political rally isn't fair use. It's a public performance of all or part of the song, or it implies and artists endorsement of a candidate.
I suppose history could easily have gone differently, and music at political events could have been fair use, but given that every election season sees this sort of thing happen that isn't the case.
How is 1000 dollars in car repairs on a 20 year old car that cost 20k new enough to make it not worth repairing? Same problem. At some point you can spent 25 million dollars on repairs, but in conjunction with everything else that will go wrong with the airframe it isn't worth spending that money since enough other things will be wrong with it it's just going to be a giant maintenance sink.
Buying a *replacement* airplane new would probably cost 244 million or something along those lines. I just junked a 93 dodge caravan, and a new 2012 dodge caravan costs about 24K (which is more or less what we paid for the 93 dodge when we bought it used in 94). And as others have pointed out, they probably salvaged a chunk of the electronics or the like (or are using this as an excuse to just buy a new set)
4. Probably not for everything. The US may self insure. Lots of big outfits do that, especially if you're working on super expensive or difficult to replace stuff. A 70k/year mechanic just did 25 million dollars in damage to an aircraft, what do you think the insurance costs are going to look like on that? The US government and military are also big enough that being insured probably costs you more money than dealing with it yourself. Remember the insurance company makes a profit, so if you're big enough to have a statistical average of accidents you manage your own insurance and don't pay someone else extra on top. And if you're talking about contractors they may not be able to afford insurance to work on billions of dollars in aircraft for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the risk is simply too high.
Did you not pay attention to: It costs me money to service each user of the game? Support costs, bandwidth costs etc? If you don't realize that that costs money we can't have a discussion here. Every user who calls you with a problem costs you the value of the game. Maintaining staff to post on forums to help people with problems (in multiple languages) costs money, the more games you sell the more people you need to have to check forums. The more copies sold the more total number of problems, the less of them you get paid for, the more your costs per unit to support. Unlike the 'used car' model we don't charge for support for the game, although that would be one (supremely dickish) option.
If you look back at the 80's there was a very long tail on used game sales, and it was a very small percent of overall sales. Like the used CD market or used DVD market. Now the used game market is in business the day after you release. And that's money that 20 years ago or even 10 years would have been going into your pocket.
Costs (notably due to higher res art) keep going up, so even if you move the same number of copies as you did 20 years ago you're making less money per 'developer' and game costs haven't gone up that much in the last 20 years, but the PS2 moved a lot more units of games easily than the current market. You have to target 2 platforms (that's a shitload more money) and sell less copies than the PS2. That's not the consumers fault, that's up to Sony and MS to sort out (and now apple and google and MS as well).
I'm not about to open the books on my financials or anyone's that I've worked with just for you. But if you think used games didn't affect our business you're living in a fantasy land. When you sell 40k units of one title, and the next title you sell 20k, but then each copy is resold and average of twice over a 3 month period, so you now have 60k copies you've had to support - because gamestop took your price, offered '10% off new' and your company then had to lay off half its staff and do 50% more support used games really kicked you in the nuts. And that's almost exactly what happened to a lot of the console guys, especially the small ones that were 40-50 person outfits.
The industry around used game sales changed completely in the middle part of last decade (well, about 2007ish Sort of coinciding with the launch of the 360 and PS3 and Wii). Used games used to be your usual sort of pawn shop kind of place. Then gamestop got into the business in a big way, and FAST. That completely changed our expectations about used games on the backend. Where before you were in a collaborative relationship with gamestop as 25% of the games market and the premium shop for games - shelf space on gamestop was *the place to be* if you wanted to get sales (along with Walmart in the US). Then it became adversarial. They wanted your game for the same price they paid before, but now they want to resell it 3 times. They're making money, and you aren't. We explained to them time and again if they didn't stop with the used game shit we'd take matters into our own hands - because if you want a product to sell the people who actually make the product need to get paid. Then Valve made Steam, and I don't even know if Gamestop have PC sections anymore, and don't care, we make more money, and have less headaches this way, and you can sell more copies of your game on Steam in the time it takes to negotiate with gamestop, than gamestop even wants to buy. PC guys have stepped past them. The console market, by its nature as a sort of lumbering behemoth will follow suit later. The current transitional phase we're in is every developer trying to find the best monetization strategy for the business, and that's where you're going to get every bone headed scheme under the sun. Consoles aren't quite at the point of being able to just sell all games on the PSN/XBL, although that would certainly be preferable.
And sure, we can agree that you should be up front with whatever the deal is on you
except that the entire history of the US isn't really much different than today. Steal land from the indians, buy ilbegotten land from the french(which they stole from the Spanish a few weeks earlier), steal land from the mexicans, fight a civil war over keeping th blacks enslaved, steal land from the spanish. Half a century of 'we don't want to be involved in whatever murder and mayhem the rest of you are up to, unless you force us into it' all while keeping blacks from being full citizens, then it was onto trying to oppress some southeast asians and then some arabs. And I'm glossing over a lot. Ok, so the methods have changed and the people being oppressed changes over time (remember when no on thought a catholic could become president?), but there's always someone looking to do bad things to someone else, and technology gives them new ways to do that, and new people to pick on.
The history of the world isn't really very friendly. The Nazi and the japanese were particularly dramatic step up in the 'evil' department, but considering all the while the US was keeping blacks as partial citizens, the british keeping indians and arabs as cheap labour, all of us were drugging up the chinese, and everyone was keeping women as half citizens frankly your country doesn't really look any different today than ever. Most of us were only one step away from mass gas chambers, but we were willing to go so far as mass sterilization and resettlement camps. The US britain and france (and as is pointed out below germans) tend to hide all this unpleasant business.
People can claim their country was some paragon of decency previously. But it's bullshit. The US has been in the business of institutionalized oppression as much as everyone else *except* the nazi's and the imperial japanese because they institutionalized mass murder. And SOPA ACTA, DHS and patriot are no more insidious than the kansas-nebraska act, the repeated gerrymandering that goes on in the US, pretty much everything we've done in canada to the native indians and the french, the british did to the irish etc. etc. The only surprising thing, and really, it hasn't been a long enough time scale to be all that surprising, is that both parties in the US are stumbling along with policies that a lot them realize are braindead. But reality has a habit of kicking you in the teeth when you ignore it, and that is happening to the US now on jobs and every time you get on an airplane, and 10 years from now no new member of congress will want the TSA as it is etc. That just the way politics works. There have always been people trying to regress hard won rights, and resisting legitimate demands on their contributing to the collective of society, and there always will be. And there will always be people on the right side of history.
Strictly speaking I'm a graphics and AI programmer, if I'm the OP you were referring to.
And used games don't affect me anymore. Because we basically do all our sales through Steam or equivalents. So there are no used game sales. Which is as I said a few steps up, the way this market is going.
When you're on the console market it's a bit different though. Especially if you're on the PS3. You pay for the bandwidth (or at least used to) used by your game. So if you put out a patch, and it gets resold 5x, that increases your costs 5x because now 5 users are downloading the same patch to their ps3. But those disks can be resold. So people will try different things. You buy a base game and get account unlocks of content, or you're really paying for the online service or whatever, but console guys will try and get your money.
Used game sales hurt. A lot. More than piracy. Pirates aren't going to pay for it no matter what you do. So you have ever more ridiculous schemes to deal with that (see megaupload take down).. But you cannot compete with "10% off new", and those people are at least buying your game. Now I'm not sure the best strategy to monetize, because as I say, I make PC games, and we've given up on retail entirely (and given the situation in the PC market we might be giving up that and moving to social after the next product, but I'll be gone by then). You make way more money per unit online, sell more units, don't have to bribe anyone for shelf space, don't have to print thousands of copies they might not take etc.
What do you suggest? Seriously. What's your monetization plan for us. The industry is mostly living on government subsidies, or dumb luck (think minecraft), or massive advertising budgets to make money. None of which are reasonable or sustainable. So how do you get cash in your pocket for developing a game? We push first day sales because that cuts into the number of used copies (there's no used sales on release day, obviously), you use DLC because you get probably 70% of the DLC value straight into your bank account (give or take distribution costs a bit). Not every game lends itself to good multiplayer (and only a relatively small portion of your userbase want multiplayer for any length of time anyway).
This whole thread to the orginal article is full of mindless "make good games and you'll make money" nonsense. Which simply doesn't pan out in the real world. Good games require a shitload of money to make and more importantly, market, and if you fuck it up even once you're out of business, even if you don't fuck it up you might be out of business. For an example look at THQ, which had some serious hits and misses this year and is on the verge of bankruptcy (Saints Row 3, red faction armageddon, some Warhammer 40k games, a spongebog game, a movie tie in to kung fu panda 2). Some of those, notably Saints Row 3 were huge hits, but a lot of people in THQ are on the verge of losing their jobs still. Or you make a series of small crappy games for Android iOS and facebook and hope you get a trickle of revenue.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the plan in TFA is going to work. But no one has any good options here that aren't mindless platitudes. We all know the government subsidies are coming to and end, and basically running your business like a gambling operation hoping for a big hit isn't a good plan (at least not when it's studios that get shut down, not big publishers usually). So there needs to be more money in developers pockets if they want to make competitive games people want to play. In the long run this simply means your games will all be on an account and not sellable. That account will be run by MS, Nintendo, Sony Apple, Google, or a handful of PC distributors, and you don't get your game on your account without paying them. In the interim, where there is still a market for physical disks that are actually the game you're going to see a lot of crazy schemes to try and monetize the existing system so if the government decides to cut subsidies from 40% to 25% the studio doesn't go out of business.
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The course itself might list as "web course online nuclear power plant operations" or the like. But as universities if we offer a degree programme, it carries the 'full weight of a regular course' so to speak. If that wasn't the case very quickly online courses would have to disappear from universities, because we cannot be offering things which aren't seen as legitimate to our reputations and our ultimate customer base which is the general public.
Now, if you're in the US and want to go to a online degree factory, well, then you're going to get what you'd expect, and I'm sure some places are sketchier than others, if you can't tell if a place is legit, neither can a prospective employer.
Probably not really. The smalled fortune 500 companies, D.R. Horton and Seaboard both have over 3000 employees (and seaboard is up around 9k), with even that many computers it would be fairly hard to be 100% sure all of them are clean all the time, especially across multiple sites and all that.
That's sort of the point. If they had any brains we wouldn't need to be telling the CEO not to have his password on a post it note on his monitor.
they *had* a deal with brazil, brazil has decided to reconsider the agreement afaik.
Officially, and probably unofficially, they want a diverse set of suppliers. India isn't in bed with Russia the way it has been for years. They have a joint fighter the SU-30MKI which is a damn good aircraft relatively, but they don't want to be seen as purely on the russian side in the arms markets. When you're as big as india you want to make sure you have friends in a lot of places. Who knows what the russians are going to be doing in the next 15 or 20 years, and they don't want to be tied to one supplier.
Depends on whether or not pakistan gets F16's, whether or not india wishes to involve itself with Iran, or anywhere else in the middle east, what the situation in Indonesia or burma may do to future indian interests, and chinese interests.
When you're buying aircraft for the next 15 or 20 years you have a lot of broad 'what if's' to consider beyond just the immediately obvious threats. A radical shakeup in the middle east or indonesia or even pakistan or burma could leave india very much in need of operational capability quickly if it wants to be taken seriously as a major power.
And the french are selling rafales with a technology transfer. Same deal they had with Brazil. The Eurofighter was the best fighter in the competition, but no technology transfer at the same level (manufacturing exchange though). The french spent some absurd amount of money developing the Rafale ( I think 40 billion euros, which works out to 200 million per aircraft for france). They're desperate to recoup some of those costs, otherwise the Rafale, which is a decent but not spectacular aircraft is looking at a per unit cost comparable to the f22.
The rafale isn't really older. It's 12 years old now from first introduction, but it's still in production, and only a 5 year older design than the F22. It's a 4.5 gen fighter, superior to an F16, F18, about on par with an F18 super hornet, inferior to a Eurofighter or F22 or the not yet available f35.
Oh, I meant before submission. If you realize a reviewer is going to tell you to do a better literature review it's probably a good idea to do that before you send in the paper. Then we're back to discussing what really warrants being cited and how.
There's a tricky balance between saying we build on this work and so necessarily reference it, and it is related to this other work (or may incorporate results from it, even if I'm not directly involved in that research) which is trying to give credit where it is due, not too much.
Science struggles how to cite widely disbursed facts. What is the speed of light? Right. You *can* cite the people who precisely measure it, but most research that relies on that data doesn't really need to cite it, because they aren't building on it. If I'm looking at spectra from a gas or a star the speed of light is really really really important to my work, but how the actual number was arrived at isn't that important. If you're a young researcher you want your work to look like it is related to a lot of things (think resume padding) so you cite more than you need to, and if you're new to the field you want your work cited as a measure how much impact it has - but judging what counts as impact is not always clear and you're pretty easy to persuade that it is better to over cite than under cite and risk being called out for plagiarism.
Another example. I'm working on a current project. One of the relevant facts to the work is the history of the Bismarck battleship (the nazi one). This is because the documentation about the history is relevant to how to quantify the statistics of the ship. But what is a valid reference for that? If anything? How about the mere existence of the ship? What factual information am I digging for that isn't sufficiently well known to be on wikipedia? Do I cite comparable information about the dozen or so other ships and aircraft she actually fought with, or do I just sort of take for granted that the ship had 38 cm guns (which directly maps to the problem I'm talking about which is balancing the relative combat power of the ship). If it was a history paper it's sort of obvious that the historical work is to be cited - discovering (or rediscovering) that information would be a worthwhile historical paper, but what about something that is only tangentially related, which is trying to define those statistics in a game?
It hasn't been uncommon for scientists to base research on 3 or 4 papers (possibly one or two of which was from their own group), and then when they're getting ready to publish to look for papers in the target journal that are related that can be cited as well (this is like self censorship, or self coercion, rather than be asked to do it, you do it on your own first0. It's not really a good practice, but I'm not sure it's as bad as the article tries to make it out to be. You really are legitimately looking for work that might be related to what you did, especially if you didn't do your literature search very well (which is harder than it sounds sometimes), and you are, as you say, citing authors you're extrapolating from (or at the very least doing related work to).
Don't misunderstand "I was talking to a guy on the street and wasn't quite sure" with "The son of the leader of a country, who is now the leader of that country", and with whom several states have relations, including china....
My father was born in india somewhere around 1941. No one is sure when, and my grandfather only passed away last year so he had the last 70 years in which he could never remember exactly, so we don't know. Back then in india you used a Lunar calendar if you were not attached to the So you pick a date and roll with it as the 'official' date and hope it is close enough. But that is a relatively unimportant guy in an unimportant town in the 1940's. With the leader of north korea you'd think he'd have an official birthday (even if it's in a lunar calendar) somewhere that someone would know.
I grant that they may have never bothered to publicize it, because as something like the 3rd son of the dear leader might not have been considered all that important to hereditary succession they didn't want to aggrandize him early and risk a coup or something. But that whole situation goes to my point of "odd".
Given they already have a covert nuclear programme doing covert experiments isn't that much of a shock. But really, everything these guys do is odd to some degree, I mean, they have a leader who was born in any of 1982, 83 or 84 and no one seems quite clear as to which. Or why they would lie about it.
It's not even clear who these outlandish lies are for, which is what makes the whole thing odd. Even if it's just misdirection to confuse anyone trying to find out the truth that doesn't make it any less odd.
Actually I started with the trivial case, and expanded to the more sophisticated one. None of them are mutually exclusive, and none of which was a rant. If you can accept that you are due to be paid for work you did even though you're dead, then we're arguing a matter of degree.
You (assuming you're the same AC as before) are jumping from MJ, John lennon and Team Bondi, all of which have immediate survivors (ex wives, children, notably, junior children in the case of MJ, the actual people) to 150 years. That's a bit of a stretch.
I put it in the frame of 'what would I be legally obligated to, and would I reasonably be able to collect payments for if I were still alive'. A corporation is a somewhat messier problem because they are legally obliged indefinitely, and naturally anyone with a brain would want to try and transfer copyright to a corporation or similar if that was an advantage.
If a 26 year old does good work, and no one discovers it's value until they are 65 (so there has been no commercial value to it for that time) should they suddenly not profit from it because it's been too long? That seems a tad unfair. My thesis is my thesis, just as my house is my house, I'm not really fond of the idea that I could ever lose rights over work I did just because the time has expired, and I'm not really fond of the idea that underage children could equally lose out for the same reason. If my work has value - either as a contract work for hire for someone else, or oh its own to be copyrighted it shouldn't magically expire. A company I was tangentially interacting with just lately discovered that it had never paid employees for a particular day. Ever. (if date the same number problem). So you dig back through your employee records for 10 years, and pay people (and some lawyers because obviously it's a bit more complicated than that). That only seems right. Even if the work I did took an hour when I was 5, it was still my work and I should be paid the entire value of that work, either per hour or as long as it generates money. The question of beyond that, which right now in the EU and I think US is life of author + 70 years. I'm not sure you really need more than that (or even that much really). But again, that's arguing degree. If you don't think you or or your estate should get paid for work you did a long time ago then we're going to have trouble having a discussion at all. I know music is different than general copyright and there's probably a sweet spot between music at whatever it is, 50 years I think, and life + 70. But in any case, the 3 examples you cited, I come down on the side of the beatles should still have ownership of their music, MJ's kids should have ownership of his, and Team Bondi employees should still get paid whatever they can from sales of LA noire.
If you want a more dramatic case, something like Lord of the Rings... which just made what, 6 billion dollars despite it having been written in the 1920's by a guy who died in the 1970's is a bit murkier. It would seem woefully unfair that you could simply wait 30 more years and not have to pay his heirs a penny of 6 billion dollars that owes itself to him, and yet doing that to Gilbert and Sullivan which is only from 40 years before Tolkien wrote LOTR would not seem unreasonable, so maybe I am biased by an exceptional case (or maybe the law should explicitly deal with the diminishing value of copyright over time).
For your hours worked, yes. If I die feb 27th I expect my employer to pay my estate for all of the wages I earned to that point, and if I am due monies later for the work done in that period (say the contract isn't paid until june) my estate would still get paid for my portion of the work.
If my estate, which at that point is transfered to someone else (who may have legally paid for my services such that my work was work for hire for them) they may continue to be paid for that work even though I'm long since dead. My work is also never entirely my own. Michael Jackson and John Lennon are good examples. If they had gotten divorces rather than died they would still be obliged to pay child support and alimony up until today. Michael jackson was not the only person who contributed to his music. All of his investors, his spouse(s), other employees etc. He is credited with having been the guy on stage, but for him to be there hundreds of other people are involved.
Should you have to pay less for a car if one of the designers died 3 years ago even though they were paid by GM?
As to L.A. Noire. The studio is shuttered but money you pay *does* go to the studio. It didn't disappear. It still exists as a legal entity with debts (that's why they went out of business), and that money goes to the artists who are still owed back wages, the owners or investors who paid the artists in the first place to make it. As of october 75% of Team Bondi debts were to former employees who weren't paid. So not paying for the game is a giant fuck you to those guys who made the game and never got paid for it, when if you did pay for the game that money would be disbursed to them. The publisher (Rockstar) who contributed to the actual making of the game, paid team bondi and participated heavily in development also would get money which they are entitled to.
How do you think the basically bankrupt interplay stays afloat? People keep buying baulders gate etc. on gog.com or similar and that gives them a trickle of revenue.
More like the other way around. If they're IPOing this late they should have a solid balance sheet already. that makes it good for everyday investors and bad for high risk, high return ones. For every facebook that should have spent the last 8 years getting its business plan in order along with customers and so on there are 100 never heard ofs that took VC, and imploded. Facebook *should*, even if their balance sheet isn't great, have a plan on how to convert that IPO money into revenue, which is what people would be investing on. And if you can't figure out how facebook is going to collect 50 billion dollars a year in revenue, you should be very skeptical of valuing them at 100 billion dollars (which is just less than half the size of IBM or HP).
Everyday investors want to own banks and GE. Boring companies that pay boring dividends and have boring stock price growth. People who have money to lose want to invest in apples and amazons. Because how close did apple shareholders come to having nothing? Right. How many not quite amazons have disappeared into oblivion?
Arguably apple, with their 100 billion dollars cash on hand is a better 'everyday' investor bet than facebook, since Apple can pay out 20-25% of its shareholder value in a dividend tomorrow if it wants to. Facebook could get crushed under the weight of privacy rules all around the world or god knows what, and they have nothing of value to cough up to shareholders if they start faltering.
Memory on consoles is a different baby completely than on PC. On a console you know exactly how quickly you can pull data in from the optical drive, and have a good idea about the hard drive. On the PC you figure most people have a couple of gigs of RAM, so you may as well use it, and you have no control over what else is using those resources on the system, so you're better to use RAM than to rely on disk access. You also have very different memory space requirements with the GPU (you might be mirroring your data between GPU and CPU memory, that sort of thing).
And yes, memory can matter a lot, that's usually textures. I always figured the easiest thing sony could have done to make the PS3 better was to swap the notebook hard drives for a desktop drive, and use the cost difference to put in 1 gig of memory rather than 512, which would have made developers have something they could point to as much easier to manage than the xbox.
But when you're actually developing on a console, you absolutely have to keep track of everything going into memory, and you are damn sure why it's there, but you also are 100% sure what every PS3 or Xbox2 will have for memory. On PC you have so much memory, and you might have been a nub and not set the right compiler options etc. but you just use the memory because it's there.
I'm not sure you're entirely on base, but you've got the right idea.
If OP wanted to take software engineering, he should have taken software engineering, not CS. They rely on much the same in basic skills but they are different things. A MSc in comp sci isn't supposed to be a programmer who's taken 10 extra courses. You're supposed to actually do, well, science. It is real work, it is the technical architect behind the system, the technical director who figures out what problems can be solved by the tech school staff, the person who develops a novel or efficient solution a problem quickly hacked together by someone who didn't really appreciate algorithm efficiency, that sort of thing. Being an IT guy is not CS. Being a professional scientist is about using a scientific process and knowledge kit to apply to a problem domain (computing in this case), so error and failure rates, efficient algorithm that sort of thing. Efficient algorithms and representations of data is a big area of CS since it sort of encompasses languages (is it easier or harder to efficiently implement an algorithm in a particular language, why?), the tradeoffs etc. You're an expert in what data is, and what you can do it, whereas a software engineer is an expert in how to use a computer to solve a problem with data. If you trained in one expect a period of retraining to do the other, they aren't mutually exclusive but the are separate and somewhat complimentary.
I teach both SE and CS students. Because there is a LOT of overlap, and you can learn in CS SE skills, but the emphasis on the typically individual responsibility of a scientist vs the collective responsibility of an engineering project aren't the same. If you get a job it's up to them to teach you the area you are deficient in, SE's are usually good at designing a system and hacking it together to work, CS is there to make it efficient or to figure out how to solve a novel problem even if they aren't the one implementing it, or figure out what problem is even solvable (whereas the SE is concerned with whether or not the solution is implementable).
I realize the US is casual with the use of language here. But if you're a scientist you're not an engineer. If you have an MA you aren't an engineer. If you have an MBA you aren't an engineer. You can become an engineer with training after the fact, but if you wanted to be an engineer you should have been an engineer.
I wouldn't consider 'open source' as work in the same way as real work is. Volunteering to help build a house uses a lot of skills like being paid to build a house. But the 'on time, on budget, with the co-workers we choose for you, not the ones we want, on the hours we tell you' is a a different environment. If you can get an MSc in comp sci you don't need to 'work' experience of open source particularly (nor would you necessarily want to give the impression you're willing to work for free).
And you see old code everywhere. Academia is full of it, because someone wrote code to solve a similar problem to this 10 years ago, and you're using it now and it's been 'maintained' by 5 other grad students who've all long since left, and you're stuck with it now. Industry is full of it 'because it works', and government is full of it because they can't get money to put in something new even if they want to, or they put money into a politicians pet project that had nothing to do with the requirements of the actual problem.
The market is changing, and the reviewer is reflecting that. People don't want to spend 600 dollars on a top end card, even if 5 years ago the 'top end' cost 800 dollars (or whatever it was).
The perception is (rightly or wrongly) that all of these things should be getting faster and cheaper at the same time. That's not entirely wrong, but it's not entirely right either. A die shrink should mean lower cost for the chip itself, depending on yields but has nothing to do with any of the other parts on the PCB, market pressures or the like. (And the reviewer probably knows AMD has the price jacked up a bit because they probably haven't moved more than 10k units of the top end card right now and are trying to get as much money as they can from them before launching other things at a lower price).
Game what at 1080p? 4 year old games? 1080p is a resolution (1920x1080) and a frequency, it says nothing about the quality of the image being drawn, it just clearly defines the size and refresh of the image. You could run the original Xcom at 1080p on a 25 dollar air cooled card, but that's not what you mean is it?
If you want to play Arkam city with something close to max settings at 1080p you need a better card than the 5750. If you're willing to take crappy settings then it *might* be possible for an air cooled 7000 series card to do that, barely. But don't expect an air cooled card anytime soon.
The way this works is every chip is a 7970 to start, and then the not perfect ones are 7950's, the ok ones will be 7800's the crappy ones 7500's the horrible ones 7200's (air cooled), and they won't ship those in volume any time soon, and even then you're not really looking at the right product. Air cooled cards are for really really really basic machines and they only sell air cooled cards to avoid junking those parts, they aren't intended for anything 3d let alone gaming.
That's what happens though. Expect that the Xbox 3, PS4 will have something on par with a 7000 series Radeon or 600 series (not yet commercial) nvidia card, at which point, to keep up with a console you'll need something new ( I don't have any insider information here, but that would be consistent with the projected timelines and everything that has happened in the past).
That's how the market has worked for a long time. The consoles come in and converge performance parity to PC's by being sold at a loss for a while, then the price of parts drop, the PC moves on technology wise, but only a few titles that are really invested in the PC take advantage of it, eventually enough stuff comes out on the PC that makes the tech in consoles show its limitations (and this is where GPGPU comes in handy, for things like cloth and smoke it's much easier to do gpgpu than to do cell work) and then the console guys have to play catch up for a while.
Off the top of my head nothing jumps out at me that's mainstream that you just could not do on a console right now (performance wise). Some of the more complex strategy games, and obviously the controls for MMO's that kind of thing, but I could pretty easily spit out a demo on a 7000 series GPU that just plain could not be done on consoles, AMD actually has a professional quality demo, called "leo.mov" (which I seem to have lost the link for) that's about 400 mb that shows of stuff you can't do on a console but it's more of a marketing tool for the 7000 series than a great tech demo. The problem is, that wouldn't work on just about anything else on the market either.
Steams hardware survey is illustrative of the market. About 48% of gaming pc's have dual core, another 43% quad core, and then 'other' (which are probably going to be largely developers or people with rigs for something else that happen to also be used for gaming at 6 and 8 core, and the 5% of the market on single core are likely laptops or people with old and broken pcs). So we're a long ways off from the 'mainstream' PC market being way better than a console. Which is why all you get are console ports.
Well that and AMD nVIDIA and Intel have been working on more cores and not radically new tech lately. Sure, you could, for not a lot of money, easily get a card 4x the performance of your 4850 (a decent 6000 series) or better, but there's only so much visual fidelity to be added compared to being able to supply your little display vs a 2560x1600 (or triple monitor or the like).
The tax situation is why gold selling is almost always frowned upon. If it had a legitimate exchange to real world money you might have the tax any gains (sort of depends on the rules around gambling income wherever you live). It would get very ugly very fast.
Consistently not, using a song in a political rally isn't fair use. It's a public performance of all or part of the song, or it implies and artists endorsement of a candidate.
I suppose history could easily have gone differently, and music at political events could have been fair use, but given that every election season sees this sort of thing happen that isn't the case.
How is 1000 dollars in car repairs on a 20 year old car that cost 20k new enough to make it not worth repairing? Same problem. At some point you can spent 25 million dollars on repairs, but in conjunction with everything else that will go wrong with the airframe it isn't worth spending that money since enough other things will be wrong with it it's just going to be a giant maintenance sink.
Buying a *replacement* airplane new would probably cost 244 million or something along those lines. I just junked a 93 dodge caravan, and a new 2012 dodge caravan costs about 24K (which is more or less what we paid for the 93 dodge when we bought it used in 94). And as others have pointed out, they probably salvaged a chunk of the electronics or the like (or are using this as an excuse to just buy a new set)
4. Probably not for everything. The US may self insure. Lots of big outfits do that, especially if you're working on super expensive or difficult to replace stuff. A 70k/year mechanic just did 25 million dollars in damage to an aircraft, what do you think the insurance costs are going to look like on that? The US government and military are also big enough that being insured probably costs you more money than dealing with it yourself. Remember the insurance company makes a profit, so if you're big enough to have a statistical average of accidents you manage your own insurance and don't pay someone else extra on top. And if you're talking about contractors they may not be able to afford insurance to work on billions of dollars in aircraft for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the risk is simply too high.
Did you not pay attention to: It costs me money to service each user of the game? Support costs, bandwidth costs etc? If you don't realize that that costs money we can't have a discussion here. Every user who calls you with a problem costs you the value of the game. Maintaining staff to post on forums to help people with problems (in multiple languages) costs money, the more games you sell the more people you need to have to check forums. The more copies sold the more total number of problems, the less of them you get paid for, the more your costs per unit to support. Unlike the 'used car' model we don't charge for support for the game, although that would be one (supremely dickish) option.
If you look back at the 80's there was a very long tail on used game sales, and it was a very small percent of overall sales. Like the used CD market or used DVD market. Now the used game market is in business the day after you release. And that's money that 20 years ago or even 10 years would have been going into your pocket.
Costs (notably due to higher res art) keep going up, so even if you move the same number of copies as you did 20 years ago you're making less money per 'developer' and game costs haven't gone up that much in the last 20 years, but the PS2 moved a lot more units of games easily than the current market. You have to target 2 platforms (that's a shitload more money) and sell less copies than the PS2. That's not the consumers fault, that's up to Sony and MS to sort out (and now apple and google and MS as well).
I'm not about to open the books on my financials or anyone's that I've worked with just for you. But if you think used games didn't affect our business you're living in a fantasy land. When you sell 40k units of one title, and the next title you sell 20k, but then each copy is resold and average of twice over a 3 month period, so you now have 60k copies you've had to support - because gamestop took your price, offered '10% off new' and your company then had to lay off half its staff and do 50% more support used games really kicked you in the nuts. And that's almost exactly what happened to a lot of the console guys, especially the small ones that were 40-50 person outfits.
The industry around used game sales changed completely in the middle part of last decade (well, about 2007ish Sort of coinciding with the launch of the 360 and PS3 and Wii). Used games used to be your usual sort of pawn shop kind of place. Then gamestop got into the business in a big way, and FAST. That completely changed our expectations about used games on the backend. Where before you were in a collaborative relationship with gamestop as 25% of the games market and the premium shop for games - shelf space on gamestop was *the place to be* if you wanted to get sales (along with Walmart in the US). Then it became adversarial. They wanted your game for the same price they paid before, but now they want to resell it 3 times. They're making money, and you aren't. We explained to them time and again if they didn't stop with the used game shit we'd take matters into our own hands - because if you want a product to sell the people who actually make the product need to get paid. Then Valve made Steam, and I don't even know if Gamestop have PC sections anymore, and don't care, we make more money, and have less headaches this way, and you can sell more copies of your game on Steam in the time it takes to negotiate with gamestop, than gamestop even wants to buy. PC guys have stepped past them. The console market, by its nature as a sort of lumbering behemoth will follow suit later. The current transitional phase we're in is every developer trying to find the best monetization strategy for the business, and that's where you're going to get every bone headed scheme under the sun. Consoles aren't quite at the point of being able to just sell all games on the PSN/XBL, although that would certainly be preferable.
And sure, we can agree that you should be up front with whatever the deal is on you
except that the entire history of the US isn't really much different than today. Steal land from the indians, buy ilbegotten land from the french(which they stole from the Spanish a few weeks earlier), steal land from the mexicans, fight a civil war over keeping th blacks enslaved, steal land from the spanish. Half a century of 'we don't want to be involved in whatever murder and mayhem the rest of you are up to, unless you force us into it' all while keeping blacks from being full citizens, then it was onto trying to oppress some southeast asians and then some arabs. And I'm glossing over a lot. Ok, so the methods have changed and the people being oppressed changes over time (remember when no on thought a catholic could become president?), but there's always someone looking to do bad things to someone else, and technology gives them new ways to do that, and new people to pick on.
The history of the world isn't really very friendly. The Nazi and the japanese were particularly dramatic step up in the 'evil' department, but considering all the while the US was keeping blacks as partial citizens, the british keeping indians and arabs as cheap labour, all of us were drugging up the chinese, and everyone was keeping women as half citizens frankly your country doesn't really look any different today than ever. Most of us were only one step away from mass gas chambers, but we were willing to go so far as mass sterilization and resettlement camps. The US britain and france (and as is pointed out below germans) tend to hide all this unpleasant business.
People can claim their country was some paragon of decency previously. But it's bullshit. The US has been in the business of institutionalized oppression as much as everyone else *except* the nazi's and the imperial japanese because they institutionalized mass murder. And SOPA ACTA, DHS and patriot are no more insidious than the kansas-nebraska act, the repeated gerrymandering that goes on in the US, pretty much everything we've done in canada to the native indians and the french, the british did to the irish etc. etc. The only surprising thing, and really, it hasn't been a long enough time scale to be all that surprising, is that both parties in the US are stumbling along with policies that a lot them realize are braindead. But reality has a habit of kicking you in the teeth when you ignore it, and that is happening to the US now on jobs and every time you get on an airplane, and 10 years from now no new member of congress will want the TSA as it is etc. That just the way politics works. There have always been people trying to regress hard won rights, and resisting legitimate demands on their contributing to the collective of society, and there always will be. And there will always be people on the right side of history.
Strictly speaking I'm a graphics and AI programmer, if I'm the OP you were referring to.
And used games don't affect me anymore. Because we basically do all our sales through Steam or equivalents. So there are no used game sales. Which is as I said a few steps up, the way this market is going.
When you're on the console market it's a bit different though. Especially if you're on the PS3. You pay for the bandwidth (or at least used to) used by your game. So if you put out a patch, and it gets resold 5x, that increases your costs 5x because now 5 users are downloading the same patch to their ps3. But those disks can be resold. So people will try different things. You buy a base game and get account unlocks of content, or you're really paying for the online service or whatever, but console guys will try and get your money.
Used game sales hurt. A lot. More than piracy. Pirates aren't going to pay for it no matter what you do. So you have ever more ridiculous schemes to deal with that (see megaupload take down).. But you cannot compete with "10% off new", and those people are at least buying your game. Now I'm not sure the best strategy to monetize, because as I say, I make PC games, and we've given up on retail entirely (and given the situation in the PC market we might be giving up that and moving to social after the next product, but I'll be gone by then). You make way more money per unit online, sell more units, don't have to bribe anyone for shelf space, don't have to print thousands of copies they might not take etc.
What do you suggest? Seriously. What's your monetization plan for us. The industry is mostly living on government subsidies, or dumb luck (think minecraft), or massive advertising budgets to make money. None of which are reasonable or sustainable. So how do you get cash in your pocket for developing a game? We push first day sales because that cuts into the number of used copies (there's no used sales on release day, obviously), you use DLC because you get probably 70% of the DLC value straight into your bank account (give or take distribution costs a bit). Not every game lends itself to good multiplayer (and only a relatively small portion of your userbase want multiplayer for any length of time anyway).
This whole thread to the orginal article is full of mindless "make good games and you'll make money" nonsense. Which simply doesn't pan out in the real world. Good games require a shitload of money to make and more importantly, market, and if you fuck it up even once you're out of business, even if you don't fuck it up you might be out of business. For an example look at THQ, which had some serious hits and misses this year and is on the verge of bankruptcy (Saints Row 3, red faction armageddon, some Warhammer 40k games, a spongebog game, a movie tie in to kung fu panda 2). Some of those, notably Saints Row 3 were huge hits, but a lot of people in THQ are on the verge of losing their jobs still. Or you make a series of small crappy games for Android iOS and facebook and hope you get a trickle of revenue.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the plan in TFA is going to work. But no one has any good options here that aren't mindless platitudes. We all know the government subsidies are coming to and end, and basically running your business like a gambling operation hoping for a big hit isn't a good plan (at least not when it's studios that get shut down, not big publishers usually). So there needs to be more money in developers pockets if they want to make competitive games people want to play. In the long run this simply means your games will all be on an account and not sellable. That account will be run by MS, Nintendo, Sony Apple, Google, or a handful of PC distributors, and you don't get your game on your account without paying them. In the interim, where there is still a market for physical disks that are actually the game you're going to see a lot of crazy schemes to try and monetize the existing system so if the government decides to cut subsidies from 40% to 25% the studio doesn't go out of business.