Let's say the game costs 10 times less in Russia. You ask Russian friend to buy it for you but you send him twice the amount required. That means you both got the game for 1/5th of the U.S.A. price. The game creators and Steam lose.
Which is exactly what's supposed to happen. If it's economically feasible for the game creators and Steam to sell games at 10% of the price in Russia, there's one of either two things happening: 1) The price they're selling for in Russa is sufficient to recoup their costs, and they're gouging Americans 2) They're forcing US customers to subsidise low Russian prices
"Region Locking" is really just digital protectionism. It's a way to let companies reap the benefits of globalism, while locking consumers out from doing the same. Companies are allowed to source widget/labour from countries overseas with smaller economies, but as soon as consumers do the same, it's time to start playing legal/technical games to keep them out.
The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population (46.3% of households with iPads have income over $100k [comscore.com]).
What percentage of the US population has a household income of over $100k? In a two-income household, that's $50k each, which isn't a particularly high income here.
Case in point: One 'liberal arts' friend of mine plays the king of the White Walkers on GoT. Another works on The Daily Show. How's your job look now, keyboard monkey?
Pretty darn good.
You have one friend who plays a minor, non-speaking role in a popular TV series. How much did that net him, and how long is that job likely to last before his out looking for another one? You have another friend who "works" on The Daily Show. That could range from really impressive (he hosts it) to the rather unimpressive (he cleans up the studio after everyone's left).
I guess if you get your job satisfaction from tossing around the names of well-known TV shows, that's a good gig. I prefer job security and a good paycheck.
My argument is that regulation doesn't prevent anything.
Murder laws shouldn't be kept because they prevent murder - they don't. They should be kept because they provide just consequences for an immoral and harmful act. Taxi regulations do neither.
Hard to call if you're dead. Regulation exists to prevent bad things from happening in the first place.
I know, right. That's why, ever since we outlawed murder, nobody has ever killed another person. Regulations my friend, regulations. They're like magic.
Or wasps, but that I can understand since they can actually hurt you.
And spiders can't? Maybe it's just because I'm an Australian, but spiders here can kill you, while a wasp sting is mostly just going to hurt like the blazes. I sort of assumed there were deadly spiders elsewhere, too.
How typical of a politician, and ESPECIALLY one in an English-speaking nation, to insist that everyone except him has to shoulder the responsibility for everything that ever goes wrong.
This article is about such issues, though. If you have a walled garden, you're basically trading your freedom, for the ability to have someone else police the software, to presumably eliminate such threats.
That trade-off's value is entirely dependant on the quality of the policing done on the software inside the walled garden. Historically, Apple's been pretty good about it, too. But with people locked into the ecosystem by their prior app purchases, there's less and less incentive for apple to spend resources keeping the quality control high.
This could be just a blip that Apple will correct, and start maintaining high standards again. But it could also be the point at which the walled garden deal starts to turn sour, and people find they've been locked inside a garden nobody's looking after.
The thing is, Android is a capable of doing all those things (issuing refunds, punishing the vendor, etc) in it's store too, without a "walled garden" approach.
The walled garden metaphor refers to the iOS platform, where users can't install applications except through Apple's blessed appstore, not to the store itself.
Most of the JS that causes issues are third party scripts from various vendors, loaded from their sites. If their CDN chokes, it affects our site. All the assets we control are accessed via a CDN, and our pages are cached to the extent permissible by their content. It's the arbitrary crap loaded in from third parties (that can't be cached or handed off to our CDN because it's dynamically generated) that screws stuff up.
The javascript on the primary site I work on takes up about 50% of the page load time. None of it is to do with functionality - it's all analytics or A/B tests or performance measuring stuff. One day something broke with the tool the marketing guys use to insert all that guff, and the site performance doubled. Inspect the DOM tree after it's loaded, and there's 30-50 iframes and script tags that have been dynamically inserted on any given page.
I'm not against javascript; it's useful for making sites do useful things. But this sort of crap just drags everything down.
I wondered why no one ever came up with the idea of a blaster that fired three bolts in a slightly spreading triangle. The lightsaber is a line - it can only block two of them, no matter who fast its wielder is.
I imagine there were three reasons:
You could intercept all three if you inclined the blade forward so you intercepted one in advance of the other two, then caught the others closer in. Alternatively, just sidestep one and deflect the other 2.
Items with mass could be controlled by force telekinesis
Nobody was particularly interested in killing Jedi when the only ones around were a mountain hermit and a swamp rat
This gave contrast and really supported the david vs goliath feel. When you apply "gritty" mid/close shots in a small environment with Stormtroopers then it obliterates that contrast and just doesn't feel right.
On the other hand, this is twenty-five years after the Alliance victory. The Empire should be the underdogs now, so a bit less Goliath treatment for them might be appropriate.
Why would cab companies clean up their act, when they can just rely on government to prevent competition anyway - as, apparently the Nevada government did.
I'd also say that the group of people willing to install a non-default browser (not IE, not Safari) are also more likely than average to change default search providers.
If you have a look at the pictures, you can see that it has more than a similarity to the iPad mini than just "rounded corners". It basically looks identical except for the Apple Logo and home button.
What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things? Really, all tablets look the same. They're basically just a rectangular touch-screen. About the only variations possible in their hardware are colour, size, and buttons - and some utilitarian designs as to which ports are located where, which are hardly distinctive.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say the game costs 10 times less in Russia. You ask Russian friend to buy it for you but you send him twice the amount required. That means you both got the game for 1/5th of the U.S.A. price. The game creators and Steam lose.
Which is exactly what's supposed to happen. If it's economically feasible for the game creators and Steam to sell games at 10% of the price in Russia, there's one of either two things happening:
1) The price they're selling for in Russa is sufficient to recoup their costs, and they're gouging Americans
2) They're forcing US customers to subsidise low Russian prices
"Region Locking" is really just digital protectionism. It's a way to let companies reap the benefits of globalism, while locking consumers out from doing the same. Companies are allowed to source widget/labour from countries overseas with smaller economies, but as soon as consumers do the same, it's time to start playing legal/technical games to keep them out.
The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population (46.3% of households with iPads have income over $100k [comscore.com]).
What percentage of the US population has a household income of over $100k? In a two-income household, that's $50k each, which isn't a particularly high income here.
Because as everyone knows, a liberal arts course makes you a better person, whereas STEM leaves you bitter, cynical and competent.
Case in point: One 'liberal arts' friend of mine plays the king of the White Walkers on GoT. Another works on The Daily Show. How's your job look now, keyboard monkey?
Pretty darn good.
You have one friend who plays a minor, non-speaking role in a popular TV series. How much did that net him, and how long is that job likely to last before his out looking for another one? You have another friend who "works" on The Daily Show. That could range from really impressive (he hosts it) to the rather unimpressive (he cleans up the studio after everyone's left).
I guess if you get your job satisfaction from tossing around the names of well-known TV shows, that's a good gig. I prefer job security and a good paycheck.
My argument is that regulation doesn't prevent anything.
Murder laws shouldn't be kept because they prevent murder - they don't. They should be kept because they provide just consequences for an immoral and harmful act. Taxi regulations do neither.
It is like the owner of corner grocery charging everyone a dollar extra because he was robbed the previous evening.
Pretty sure grocery stores do pay for repairs/stock loss/insurance through increasing the price of their goods. How else would they do it?
Hard to call if you're dead. Regulation exists to prevent bad things from happening in the first place.
I know, right. That's why, ever since we outlawed murder, nobody has ever killed another person. Regulations my friend, regulations. They're like magic.
Average GTA player demographic?
Or wasps, but that I can understand since they can actually hurt you.
And spiders can't? Maybe it's just because I'm an Australian, but spiders here can kill you, while a wasp sting is mostly just going to hurt like the blazes. I sort of assumed there were deadly spiders elsewhere, too.
How typical of a politician, and ESPECIALLY one in an English-speaking nation, to insist that everyone except him has to shoulder the responsibility for everything that ever goes wrong.
FTFY
2 *known* in 1.2M. But yes, it's their future actions that will be the most important indicator.
This article is about such issues, though. If you have a walled garden, you're basically trading your freedom, for the ability to have someone else police the software, to presumably eliminate such threats.
That trade-off's value is entirely dependant on the quality of the policing done on the software inside the walled garden. Historically, Apple's been pretty good about it, too. But with people locked into the ecosystem by their prior app purchases, there's less and less incentive for apple to spend resources keeping the quality control high.
This could be just a blip that Apple will correct, and start maintaining high standards again. But it could also be the point at which the walled garden deal starts to turn sour, and people find they've been locked inside a garden nobody's looking after.
The thing is, Android is a capable of doing all those things (issuing refunds, punishing the vendor, etc) in it's store too, without a "walled garden" approach.
The walled garden metaphor refers to the iOS platform, where users can't install applications except through Apple's blessed appstore, not to the store itself.
The dev team didn't make any choices at all. The dev team doesn't write their own requirements.
Most of the JS that causes issues are third party scripts from various vendors, loaded from their sites. If their CDN chokes, it affects our site. All the assets we control are accessed via a CDN, and our pages are cached to the extent permissible by their content. It's the arbitrary crap loaded in from third parties (that can't be cached or handed off to our CDN because it's dynamically generated) that screws stuff up.
The javascript on the primary site I work on takes up about 50% of the page load time. None of it is to do with functionality - it's all analytics or A/B tests or performance measuring stuff. One day something broke with the tool the marketing guys use to insert all that guff, and the site performance doubled. Inspect the DOM tree after it's loaded, and there's 30-50 iframes and script tags that have been dynamically inserted on any given page.
I'm not against javascript; it's useful for making sites do useful things. But this sort of crap just drags everything down.
Pounds? I didn't even know Black Friday was a thing in Britain. It's not here in Aus.
I wondered why no one ever came up with the idea of a blaster that fired three bolts in a slightly spreading triangle. The lightsaber is a line - it can only block two of them, no matter who fast its wielder is.
I imagine there were three reasons:
This gave contrast and really supported the david vs goliath feel. When you apply "gritty" mid/close shots in a small environment with Stormtroopers then it obliterates that contrast and just doesn't feel right.
On the other hand, this is twenty-five years after the Alliance victory. The Empire should be the underdogs now, so a bit less Goliath treatment for them might be appropriate.
Why would cab companies clean up their act, when they can just rely on government to prevent competition anyway - as, apparently the Nevada government did.
Absolutely. BitCoin wasn't designed to be an investment, it is intended as a means to store and transfer wealth.
The fact that some people made out like bandits investing is a side-effect of the system, not its reason for being.
Because "non-binding resolutions" are so impressive.
I'd also say that the group of people willing to install a non-default browser (not IE, not Safari) are also more likely than average to change default search providers.
If you have a look at the pictures, you can see that it has more than a similarity to the iPad mini than just "rounded corners". It basically looks identical except for the Apple Logo and home button.
What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things? Really, all tablets look the same. They're basically just a rectangular touch-screen. About the only variations possible in their hardware are colour, size, and buttons - and some utilitarian designs as to which ports are located where, which are hardly distinctive.
Because goodness knows, nobody's been assaulted by a licensed taxi driver.