I disagree. Judging by forums like GameDev, programmers are most in demand, then artists, and then least of all, designers. There's no end of wannabe designers who are "I've got a great idea for my game! Now can someone please write it for me?" Posts that say "I'm a programmer looking for someone to design me something" are unheard of.
Now sure, you might say the problem is that these people aren't any good, but you could make the same comment about programmers - that skilled programmers are rare just as skilled designers are.
Design and programming often go hand in hand - often you won't know if ideas are viable unless you've prototyped it. And even if someone else is doing the coding, you still need an understanding of programming yourself in order to know what is feasible, and how best to approach something.
Yes, good design is important, but don't make the mistake of talking about designers and programmers as if they are separate beasts. Non-programming designers are just the endless number of people who think they have a great "idea".
The difference between pharmaceuticals and homeopathic medicine is that pharmaceutical companies try to distill what the "active" ingredient in the cure is - and turn it into a pill with bulking fillers.
As opposed to homeopaths who get rid of the active ingredient (if there ever was one) entirely, and turn it into plain water?
I suspect you are confusing traditional medicine with claptrap like homeopathy. Traditional medicines are natural substances that in many cases do have an effect. This is because they contain some substance. There's nothing magical about it - they can be tested scientifically. For example, willow bark can cure headaches - this is because it contains salicylic acid. These days most people carry it in pill form, as it's more convenient than lugging a tree around with you.
Homeopathy on the other hand is just turning things into plain water. There is no known way they could have an effect, and anyway, scientific tests have shown that their effect is no different to drinking water.
If you want to be an anti-drug person who prefers willow bark to aspirin pills, then good luck to you. But please don't confused scientifically tested conventional medicine with made up rubbish like homeopathy.
Indeed, it should be fraud if they are claiming it has benefits.
(The case I'd be amused to see is a company selling water straight out of a tap, claiming that it's "homeopathic"... I'm not sure that should be fraud otoh, as there is of course no difference between the substances.)
Sure, there are interesting arguments about the use of placebos. But that's no excuse for allowing people to profit by selling water, fraudulently claiming it does something that it does not. Note also that homeopath believers typically claim that it has an effect beyond that of a placebo.
And yes, if we were just wanting to use placebos, you are right: what does it matter what the pill is made of. There is no need to go through the long winded homeopathic ritual, you could just give them water and tell them you'd done whatever hocus pocus to it.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's shaking up the industry, but on the other hand it's clear that it is a substantial market, and a different kind of market.
So, "Product that's been on the market for years has a 'substantial' market" - not exactly quite the same headline is it? The same claim could be made for every product in existence that wasn't an outright flop. So if this is really newsworthy, why don't we see this news article for every other product out there too?
Different kind of market? To what? To consoles? Well of course - because it's not a console. You might as well say it's a different kind of market to toasters.
I can see it now: "Random Motorola phone shakes up the video game industry".
- in the comments: "Well I wouldn't go so far as to say it's shaking up the industry, but it's clearly a substantial market, and a different kind of market".
You can make smaller games (and yes, this certainly favors smaller shops) for less money that sell for smaller amounts but come out more often and still do well.
Allow me to be the first to welcome you to the 21st Century (that the mobile phone market allowed game developers to do this started years before Apple joined the club). The tactic of selling some crappy tetris clone for a few dollars, and making money from it, was around for years. And those sensible to target open standards such as Java can get a market of 2.1 billion phones.
How big was that Iphone market again?
A shame that Apple don't support open standards though. At this rate, even the Amiga will have Java before the Iphone does...
There is, however, a much lower barrier to entry on all non-console platforms than there is for the DS and other consoles
Fixed that for you. Even if we rule out consoles, the Iphone is nothing special both in terms of development costs (in fact, at $99, the Iphone is considerably worse off than most platforms, which do not require any fee), and market share (take the billions of PCs. Hell, if you really must be pro-Apple, the number of Macs sold is still surely greater than the Iphone market).
As for approval, what about the restrictions of only distributing on the Apple store, and only if Apple allow it?
Your argument is an argument for developing for the Windows PC over consoles. There's no point trying to fudge it so that somehow the Iphone comes out top as a non-console alternative. I might as well claim that high console development costs means that people should develop for the Amiga!
Don't forget that the Iphone is also now setting the gold standard for fluidity!
to interpersonal relationships ("it has a phone!!!")
I honestly will not be surprised anymore if I see an article on Slashdot telling us how wonderful the Iphone is for allowing people to communicate with people who aren't present.
I can hear the special pleading now: "But it doesn't matter that Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated an iPhone-like device 131 years before Apple did. That clearly doesn't count, as it obviously wasn't very useful, and it was clearly Apple who popularised the concept of iPhone-like devices (I never had a phone until Apple made one, so clearly no one else did either except for a few geeks that no one cares about)."
In your opinion. In my opinion, other phones have useful features too (e.g., being able to do things without hacking it, or ease of use by copy/pasting). YMMV. That's the thing about preferences, everyone has their own opinion. Just because you like one phone, doesn't mean it is therefore the best phone ever, or the first phone to do anything.
I mean, I quite like chocolate cakes, but I don't therefore conclude on that alone that chocolate cakes are shaking up some other industry.
Indeed. To add to that, how many Windows PCs are there out there? Clearly it's ludicrous to suggest that a 30 million platform is shaking up any industry, let alone the video games industry (it's also misleading to have the headline as "Iphone", when surely the majority of sales are for the Ipod - it comes across as a cheap attempt to make the Iphone, which is a niche device, look more popular by conflating it with an Apple product that for once actually was popular).
Even if we want to be pro-Apple: even the number of Macs sold surely far outdoes the number of Iphones sold? So why don't they say "Macintosh Shakes Up the Video Game Industry"? (The answer is obvious of course: because people would see how stupid such a claim was. But the Iphone seems to have a bigger RDF around it.)
Most other phones: $0, plus cost of a PC (cheaper than $600) PC: $0, plus cost of a PC (cheaper than $600) Commodore Amiga: $0, plus cost of an Amiga
So yeah, the point of your post is that developing for consoles is expensive. I agree that's annoying, but that's got nothing to do with the Iphone, anymore than it has with any other phone, or any other non-console platform, in fact. The fact that, when you get down to it, the Iphone is actually worse than most other phones for development costs, just shows how bias and misleading the comparison is.
I know Iphone fans like to scrape the barrel to find ways to trumpet their beloved phone, but really this is getting tedious. Why not just use and enjoy whatever phone you use, rather than having to run misleading media spin trying to make it look like the messiah of mobile phones?
Next you'll be telling me the Iphone is great because you can use it to access a webpage...
Nice to see that insults and flames are acceptable on Apple articles.
The context was forgotten by the story - they are the ones too stupid to understand how to compare different products. Either you look at phones and consoles separately (in which case, comparing Iphone sales to consoles is meaningless), or you treat them together (in which case, sales of other phones that can play games is most certainly relevant).
You can't have it both ways. Which is it?
I might as well say that my Motorola V980 is shaking up the industry, because it sells more than the Amiga does these days. It's easy to make a product look number 1 if you are selective about your comparisons.
...must be true, because I can play games on it. I'll just conveniently ignore all the other phones that are more popular.
You forgot blackberry: over 50 million.
Not to mention many hundreds of millions for nokia/ericsson/motorola.
Another example of Apple mod-abuse - the above is not flamebait. If anything, the original article is flamebait, and this response points out why it is misleading: if we are comparing one particular phone manufacturer to games consoles, why not compare other phone manufacturers too, since they can all play games? It comes across as a cheap attempt to make the Iphone look popular, by comparing it, and only it, to a smaller market.
Yes, it's interesting that phones are likely to become more popular as handheld gaming devices than dedicated devices, because most people don't want to carry around a dedicated device. But there's nothing special about the Iphone. And the same may end up being true soon of cameras and mp3 players, anyway.
Does the fact that Nokia's sales of hundreds of millions of phones, that contain cameras, mean that "Nokia Shakes Up the Camera Industry"? That in itself would be absurd enough, but this article is worse - it doesn't say Nokia, it instead picks up a niche-player in the market, and just rides on the pro-Apple hype.
Of course, no doubt I'll be modded down too, as happens with any post that advocates a phone other than the precious Iphone.
Indeed. It's worse than that - they've also taken to doing random drug searches at places of public transport, where everyone getting off a train that day is detained to be sniffed by a dog. I guess their logic is that because it's only a dog sniff, that doesn't in itself count as an official search (unless the dog barks, in which case you get pulled aside for a proper search). But the problem is that nonetheless people are forcibly detained, and I would be curious to see it tested in court.
I experienced this the other weekend in Cambridge - despite the ridiculous over the top scale of it (I honestly thought there'd been a murder or bombscare, what with police and police tents all over the place, but oh no, it was fishing for drugs), they only had one dog, meaning a 30 minute delay in a queue before I was let out. My experience was similar to this write up of one in 2008. No explanation was given, nor any indication of what law we were being detained under.
The Guardian reports that this sort of thing is becoming common at underground stations too:
Afterwards I took a photo, only to have an undercover police officer suddenly reveal himself to me, claiming I wasn't allowed to take pictures of him without permission. So to get slightly back on topic, apparently in Britain we have no right to privacy in a public place (whether it's blogging, or indeed CCTV, or indeed getting off of public transport), but for some reason that doesn't apply to the police...
When Firefox announces this a year later, don't forget to respond to the thread telling us how you and the other 23 people who actually use Firefox think how revolutionary it is. Thanks.
No - the irresponsibility and selfish behaviour lies with the company, if they have a rule about limited sick days.
You aren't at work doing a halfassed job because that's all you can do with the energy you have left. B2. I'm not forced to spend time fixing your halfassed work.
Now who's only being concerned about their own interests?
Yes, if you work in a place that does not provide paid sick days, that's unfortunate. But it's worse of a problem if you manage to infect the rest of the office, putting us all in a half dead state.
But why are you complaining - surely by your own logic, when you're then infected, you shouldn't complain that you then have to take unpaid leave. That would just be "selfish" of you, right?
Perhaps if companies didn't have this notion that one can only be sick a limted number of days a year, he'd have gladly taken the sick day in the first place.
Yes clearly, Slashdotters use what everyone else uses. That's why we all agree that IE is the best browser! I hope you're not one of those 8 Firefox users!
(Honestly, the two-faced snobbery is getting old - using alternative products to Microsoft is seen as good on the one hand, but if you use the "wrong" choice like Opera, we get looked down upon. Despite the fact that we switched from Microsoft long before it became trendy to do so.)
VAT is not a poll tax. If you buy more luxuries, you pay more VAT (it's dabatable whether items such as adults shoes and Tampax are luxuries, but that's the idea).
By that reasoning, broadband is just as much a "luxury". People who buy more things such as cars/holidays/broadband pay more tax.
I'm not saying that the tax is a good thing. I'm just saying it's ridiculous to suggest that 50p on broadband suddenly means that poor people have a higher tax rate than rich people, and I'm not convinced that the flat rate nature of it is the major problem (unless one opposes all regressive taxes, such as VAT).
I'm confused as to your point - bread isn't taxed, and even with the existence of some fixed rate taxes, we still have income tax which is a progressive tax.
Whether overall the total tax paid works out as a progressive, proportional or regressive, I have no idea. However, I don't see how it could be the case where your tax rate works out as twice as much, or even more, than someone who earns twice as much as you, as you claim?
There are lots of other taxes that are poll taxes (e.g., VAT). I guess the logic is "If you make use of something, you should help towards making it available for those who do not have it - but if you don't have it at all, you shouldn't have to pay at all".
And we still have income tax - so no, it hasn't become unfashionable to "tax the rich" all of a sudden.
Pirates generally only trade what's popular; being able to drink straight from the labels' tap means I can get whatever I want, whether it is popular or not
I have no idea, but I'd be very surprised if the available collection offered under this deal is broader than what someone could find by downloading already (especially as it's only one music company doing this). Add to that things like rare bootlegs - do you think they'll be offered by Universal?
We have the European Convention on Human Rights. Unfortunately it doesn't have quite the same teeth (if a European court finds something unlawful, the UK Government evidently just carries on doing it, saying "Maybe we'll look at it at some point and introduce a minor insignificant change in the hopes it'll fix the problem" - as happened with the case of fingerprinting of people not convicted of any crime). But it's something, nonetheless.
Files downloaded from the site have an appropriate MP3 tag saying so. Before you can cancel your contract, you must download and run appropriate program which will delete all MP3s with the appropriate tag. Don't want to run it? Then you can't get out before the end of your contract.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Judging by forums like GameDev, programmers are most in demand, then artists, and then least of all, designers. There's no end of wannabe designers who are "I've got a great idea for my game! Now can someone please write it for me?" Posts that say "I'm a programmer looking for someone to design me something" are unheard of.
Now sure, you might say the problem is that these people aren't any good, but you could make the same comment about programmers - that skilled programmers are rare just as skilled designers are.
Design and programming often go hand in hand - often you won't know if ideas are viable unless you've prototyped it. And even if someone else is doing the coding, you still need an understanding of programming yourself in order to know what is feasible, and how best to approach something.
Yes, good design is important, but don't make the mistake of talking about designers and programmers as if they are separate beasts. Non-programming designers are just the endless number of people who think they have a great "idea".
The difference between pharmaceuticals and homeopathic medicine is that pharmaceutical companies try to distill what the "active" ingredient in the cure is - and turn it into a pill with bulking fillers.
As opposed to homeopaths who get rid of the active ingredient (if there ever was one) entirely, and turn it into plain water?
I suspect you are confusing traditional medicine with claptrap like homeopathy. Traditional medicines are natural substances that in many cases do have an effect. This is because they contain some substance. There's nothing magical about it - they can be tested scientifically. For example, willow bark can cure headaches - this is because it contains salicylic acid. These days most people carry it in pill form, as it's more convenient than lugging a tree around with you.
Homeopathy on the other hand is just turning things into plain water. There is no known way they could have an effect, and anyway, scientific tests have shown that their effect is no different to drinking water.
If you want to be an anti-drug person who prefers willow bark to aspirin pills, then good luck to you. But please don't confused scientifically tested conventional medicine with made up rubbish like homeopathy.
Indeed, it should be fraud if they are claiming it has benefits.
(The case I'd be amused to see is a company selling water straight out of a tap, claiming that it's "homeopathic" ... I'm not sure that should be fraud otoh, as there is of course no difference between the substances.)
Where do we get these placebos???
Sure, there are interesting arguments about the use of placebos. But that's no excuse for allowing people to profit by selling water, fraudulently claiming it does something that it does not. Note also that homeopath believers typically claim that it has an effect beyond that of a placebo.
And yes, if we were just wanting to use placebos, you are right: what does it matter what the pill is made of. There is no need to go through the long winded homeopathic ritual, you could just give them water and tell them you'd done whatever hocus pocus to it.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's shaking up the industry, but on the other hand it's clear that it is a substantial market, and a different kind of market.
So, "Product that's been on the market for years has a 'substantial' market" - not exactly quite the same headline is it? The same claim could be made for every product in existence that wasn't an outright flop. So if this is really newsworthy, why don't we see this news article for every other product out there too?
Different kind of market? To what? To consoles? Well of course - because it's not a console. You might as well say it's a different kind of market to toasters.
I can see it now: "Random Motorola phone shakes up the video game industry".
- in the comments: "Well I wouldn't go so far as to say it's shaking up the industry, but it's clearly a substantial market, and a different kind of market".
You can make smaller games (and yes, this certainly favors smaller shops) for less money that sell for smaller amounts but come out more often and still do well.
Allow me to be the first to welcome you to the 21st Century (that the mobile phone market allowed game developers to do this started years before Apple joined the club). The tactic of selling some crappy tetris clone for a few dollars, and making money from it, was around for years. And those sensible to target open standards such as Java can get a market of 2.1 billion phones.
How big was that Iphone market again?
A shame that Apple don't support open standards though. At this rate, even the Amiga will have Java before the Iphone does...
There is, however, a much lower barrier to entry on all non-console platforms than there is for the DS and other consoles
Fixed that for you. Even if we rule out consoles, the Iphone is nothing special both in terms of development costs (in fact, at $99, the Iphone is considerably worse off than most platforms, which do not require any fee), and market share (take the billions of PCs. Hell, if you really must be pro-Apple, the number of Macs sold is still surely greater than the Iphone market).
As for approval, what about the restrictions of only distributing on the Apple store, and only if Apple allow it?
Your argument is an argument for developing for the Windows PC over consoles. There's no point trying to fudge it so that somehow the Iphone comes out top as a non-console alternative. I might as well claim that high console development costs means that people should develop for the Amiga!
Don't forget that the Iphone is also now setting the gold standard for fluidity!
to interpersonal relationships ("it has a phone!!!")
I honestly will not be surprised anymore if I see an article on Slashdot telling us how wonderful the Iphone is for allowing people to communicate with people who aren't present.
I can hear the special pleading now: "But it doesn't matter that Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated an iPhone-like device 131 years before Apple did. That clearly doesn't count, as it obviously wasn't very useful, and it was clearly Apple who popularised the concept of iPhone-like devices (I never had a phone until Apple made one, so clearly no one else did either except for a few geeks that no one cares about)."
In your opinion. In my opinion, other phones have useful features too (e.g., being able to do things without hacking it, or ease of use by copy/pasting). YMMV. That's the thing about preferences, everyone has their own opinion. Just because you like one phone, doesn't mean it is therefore the best phone ever, or the first phone to do anything.
I mean, I quite like chocolate cakes, but I don't therefore conclude on that alone that chocolate cakes are shaking up some other industry.
Indeed. To add to that, how many Windows PCs are there out there? Clearly it's ludicrous to suggest that a 30 million platform is shaking up any industry, let alone the video games industry (it's also misleading to have the headline as "Iphone", when surely the majority of sales are for the Ipod - it comes across as a cheap attempt to make the Iphone, which is a niche device, look more popular by conflating it with an Apple product that for once actually was popular).
Even if we want to be pro-Apple: even the number of Macs sold surely far outdoes the number of Iphones sold? So why don't they say "Macintosh Shakes Up the Video Game Industry"? (The answer is obvious of course: because people would see how stupid such a claim was. But the Iphone seems to have a bigger RDF around it.)
Most other phones: $0, plus cost of a PC (cheaper than $600)
PC: $0, plus cost of a PC (cheaper than $600)
Commodore Amiga: $0, plus cost of an Amiga
So yeah, the point of your post is that developing for consoles is expensive. I agree that's annoying, but that's got nothing to do with the Iphone, anymore than it has with any other phone, or any other non-console platform, in fact. The fact that, when you get down to it, the Iphone is actually worse than most other phones for development costs, just shows how bias and misleading the comparison is.
I know Iphone fans like to scrape the barrel to find ways to trumpet their beloved phone, but really this is getting tedious. Why not just use and enjoy whatever phone you use, rather than having to run misleading media spin trying to make it look like the messiah of mobile phones?
Next you'll be telling me the Iphone is great because you can use it to access a webpage...
Nice to see that insults and flames are acceptable on Apple articles.
The context was forgotten by the story - they are the ones too stupid to understand how to compare different products. Either you look at phones and consoles separately (in which case, comparing Iphone sales to consoles is meaningless), or you treat them together (in which case, sales of other phones that can play games is most certainly relevant).
You can't have it both ways. Which is it?
I might as well say that my Motorola V980 is shaking up the industry, because it sells more than the Amiga does these days. It's easy to make a product look number 1 if you are selective about your comparisons.
...must be true, because I can play games on it. I'll just conveniently ignore all the other phones that are more popular.
You forgot blackberry: over 50 million.
Not to mention many hundreds of millions for nokia/ericsson/motorola.
Another example of Apple mod-abuse - the above is not flamebait. If anything, the original article is flamebait, and this response points out why it is misleading: if we are comparing one particular phone manufacturer to games consoles, why not compare other phone manufacturers too, since they can all play games? It comes across as a cheap attempt to make the Iphone look popular, by comparing it, and only it, to a smaller market.
Yes, it's interesting that phones are likely to become more popular as handheld gaming devices than dedicated devices, because most people don't want to carry around a dedicated device. But there's nothing special about the Iphone. And the same may end up being true soon of cameras and mp3 players, anyway.
Does the fact that Nokia's sales of hundreds of millions of phones, that contain cameras, mean that "Nokia Shakes Up the Camera Industry"? That in itself would be absurd enough, but this article is worse - it doesn't say Nokia, it instead picks up a niche-player in the market, and just rides on the pro-Apple hype.
Of course, no doubt I'll be modded down too, as happens with any post that advocates a phone other than the precious Iphone.
Indeed. It's worse than that - they've also taken to doing random drug searches at places of public transport, where everyone getting off a train that day is detained to be sniffed by a dog. I guess their logic is that because it's only a dog sniff, that doesn't in itself count as an official search (unless the dog barks, in which case you get pulled aside for a proper search). But the problem is that nonetheless people are forcibly detained, and I would be curious to see it tested in court.
I experienced this the other weekend in Cambridge - despite the ridiculous over the top scale of it (I honestly thought there'd been a murder or bombscare, what with police and police tents all over the place, but oh no, it was fishing for drugs), they only had one dog, meaning a 30 minute delay in a queue before I was let out. My experience was similar to this write up of one in 2008. No explanation was given, nor any indication of what law we were being detained under.
The Guardian reports that this sort of thing is becoming common at underground stations too:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/31/internationalcrime
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/09/drugsandalcohol
Afterwards I took a photo, only to have an undercover police officer suddenly reveal himself to me, claiming I wasn't allowed to take pictures of him without permission. So to get slightly back on topic, apparently in Britain we have no right to privacy in a public place (whether it's blogging, or indeed CCTV, or indeed getting off of public transport), but for some reason that doesn't apply to the police...
When Firefox announces this a year later, don't forget to respond to the thread telling us how you and the other 23 people who actually use Firefox think how revolutionary it is. Thanks.
No - the irresponsibility and selfish behaviour lies with the company, if they have a rule about limited sick days.
You aren't at work doing a halfassed job because that's all you can do with the energy you have left.
B2. I'm not forced to spend time fixing your halfassed work.
Now who's only being concerned about their own interests?
Yes, if you work in a place that does not provide paid sick days, that's unfortunate. But it's worse of a problem if you manage to infect the rest of the office, putting us all in a half dead state.
But why are you complaining - surely by your own logic, when you're then infected, you shouldn't complain that you then have to take unpaid leave. That would just be "selfish" of you, right?
Perhaps if companies didn't have this notion that one can only be sick a limted number of days a year, he'd have gladly taken the sick day in the first place.
Yes clearly, Slashdotters use what everyone else uses. That's why we all agree that IE is the best browser! I hope you're not one of those 8 Firefox users!
(Honestly, the two-faced snobbery is getting old - using alternative products to Microsoft is seen as good on the one hand, but if you use the "wrong" choice like Opera, we get looked down upon. Despite the fact that we switched from Microsoft long before it became trendy to do so.)
VAT is not a poll tax. If you buy more luxuries, you pay more VAT (it's dabatable whether items such as adults shoes and Tampax are luxuries, but that's the idea).
By that reasoning, broadband is just as much a "luxury". People who buy more things such as cars/holidays/broadband pay more tax.
I'm not saying that the tax is a good thing. I'm just saying it's ridiculous to suggest that 50p on broadband suddenly means that poor people have a higher tax rate than rich people, and I'm not convinced that the flat rate nature of it is the major problem (unless one opposes all regressive taxes, such as VAT).
I'm confused as to your point - bread isn't taxed, and even with the existence of some fixed rate taxes, we still have income tax which is a progressive tax.
Whether overall the total tax paid works out as a progressive, proportional or regressive, I have no idea. However, I don't see how it could be the case where your tax rate works out as twice as much, or even more, than someone who earns twice as much as you, as you claim?
There are lots of other taxes that are poll taxes (e.g., VAT). I guess the logic is "If you make use of something, you should help towards making it available for those who do not have it - but if you don't have it at all, you shouldn't have to pay at all".
And we still have income tax - so no, it hasn't become unfashionable to "tax the rich" all of a sudden.
My 5 year old Motorola V980 supports tethering out of the box. It Just Works.
Though I admit, it doesn't have the iPhone-like fluidity. If I drop it in water, it just sinks.
Pirates generally only trade what's popular; being able to drink straight from the labels' tap means I can get whatever I want, whether it is popular or not
I have no idea, but I'd be very surprised if the available collection offered under this deal is broader than what someone could find by downloading already (especially as it's only one music company doing this). Add to that things like rare bootlegs - do you think they'll be offered by Universal?
We have the European Convention on Human Rights. Unfortunately it doesn't have quite the same teeth (if a European court finds something unlawful, the UK Government evidently just carries on doing it, saying "Maybe we'll look at it at some point and introduce a minor insignificant change in the hopes it'll fix the problem" - as happened with the case of fingerprinting of people not convicted of any crime). But it's something, nonetheless.
Indeed - I love how the submitter actually thinks that there's never been a phone that can play games before the Iphone came along...
Files downloaded from the site have an appropriate MP3 tag saying so. Before you can cancel your contract, you must download and run appropriate program which will delete all MP3s with the appropriate tag. Don't want to run it? Then you can't get out before the end of your contract.
How would they enforce this without DRM?